Bridge for Passing

Three

WE ARRIVED AT THE delightful town of Obama after a seven-hour journey by plane, train and car. It was midnight when we reached our hotel, and our beds, made Japanese fashion on the tatami mats on the floor, looked and were comfortable. It was a real Japanese hotel — food, plumbing and all, a big hotel, and in its way comfortable to the point of some luxury.

Again I was in a Japanese bed. A thick mattress laid upon the floor mats, a soft mattress, sheets and pillows and silk-covered quilt, all immaculately clean, provided the exact combination of hard and soft for the most restful sleep. There is, I think, a certain security in sleeping on the floor, perhaps because there is nothing to fall from. The restless sleeper may fling out arms and legs and even roll over and over, and he will be on the same level. It is the security the human creature always feels when he is on stable earth, a contact with the basic plain. Babies know it by instinct and sleep most soundly, therefore, when they sleep on their stomachs. Then, if they wake, or only dream, they feel hands and feet touch solidity instead of clutching at the air. However narrow the bed, if it is made upon the floor it seems spacious. And how sensible, too, the use of room! By day the bedroom is made into a pleasant sitting room, the bedding folded into closets, a wise use of space in a small and crowded country.

I slept well but woke early, eager to see the locations chosen for the filming of the picture. It had been late when we arrived, and I did not know what the views would be from the wide windows of the small veranda upon which my room opened. They faced south upon a curved bay, the bay surrounded by green mountains. The street lay between hotel and sea, and beneath my windows was a large pool of steaming hot water, natural heat, for Obama is a famous spa, with natural hot springs.

As soon as I stirred, the paper-covered shoji slid back and a pleasant little Japanese maid in a gay yukata, or cotton kimono, came in, knelt and bowed, and chattered in Japanese while she put away the bed. In a few minutes my bedroom was a sitting room, a low polished table in the center, cushions to sit upon, a backrest to lean against. The tokonoma alcove held a graceful vase of fresh flowers and a landscape scroll by a good artist.

“Breakfast,” the maid told me in gestures, “very soon.”

I nodded, and went down a flight of stairs to my private bathroom, and had a Japanese bath. The water in the little pool was the natural hot water and very refreshing, stimulating without being exhausting. And breakfast was an egg, some fruit, salt fish and rice. The mineral bath had made me hungry. After breakfast we set forth in a car. … Here I pause to say that the Japanese cars are as extraordinary as their drivers. They are adapted to an abrupt landscape and perilous roads. Japan has many good roads, far more than I remembered from early visits, but these cars go with equal spirit on rough narrow roads or cement and asphalt. Most roads are narrow and do not allow room for comfortable passage. Some, and not a few, allow for no passage at all. When two cars meet face to face on such a road, both stop. The drivers take stock of each other. Sooner or later one of them makes up his mind that he is the weaker and prudently he backs until he finds a corner where he can wait and let the other pass. A bus or a truck driver does not take stock. He simply waits for the other car to get out of the way, with an air of doing him a favor by not running him down over the cliff. There seems always to be at least one cliff on the side of every road in Japan and very often both sides overhang cliffs, without guard rails or protection. The reason, I suppose, is that when nearly every road runs at the top of a cliff above the sea, there is no use in dreaming about guard rails. People must learn to take care of themselves. The same principle holds true for driving through towns and villages and hordes of bicyclists. The result is that people do look after themselves and they teach their children to do so, and remarkably few accidents occur, at least in proportion to hazard!

… We drove for an hour through fantastically beautiful country and all my memories came alive, for I have lived on Kyushu for months at a time in an earlier incarnation. How well I remembered these sharply pointed mountains, accustomed to sudden mists of rain, and these indented shores and water-worn rocks, these villages sheltering in coves, the farm houses, their steep roofs thatched three feet deep, and the terraced fields, climbing step by step up the hillsides and even nearly to the tops of mountains! Nothing was changed. I put out of my mind the bomb-wrecked city of Nagasaki, which was very near, because the Japanese have put it out of mind, too, and have built a new city.

Later I did go to see it, and found it the new-and-old combination symbolic of all Japan these days — new, the monument erected in memory of those who died when the second atomic bomb was dropped; old, the house built on a hill where Puccini visited while he wrote Madame Butterfly. It is a tourist spot now, this house, and not well-kept and not even clean. Too many times has that story been told, and now it is quite out of date, for young western soldiers marry their Japanese sweethearts and if they do not, then Miki takes care of the babies.

And of old and new, nothing was more startlingly new than being invited almost casually one hot summer’s day to greet the Emperor and Empress in the city of Fukuoka, a meeting impossible in the old days, when these two personages were as remote, not to say as improbable, as gods. That day in Fukuoka, however, we stood in line at the railroad station to welcome with bows the august ones. They descended from the train wearing western dress, and looking kind and somewhat weary. The Emperor might have been a not too cheerful business man and his wife a motherly and anxious helpmate, her dress long and her hat a problem. I wondered if they remembered with nostalgia the old days when they lived, remote and cool, upon Olympus.

I cannot deny that my heart beat faster as we approached the village of Kitsu, which was where our fisher boy, Toru, lived. Two hundred years ago Kitsu was wiped clean by a tidal wave. It was easy to see how it happened, for this small fishing village lies like a saddle between two mountains, the lesser one terraced straight up to the top and over. I must have been thinking of Kitsu when I wrote The Big Wave, so perfectly did this village fit the story. For after the tidal wave the people rebuilt again in the same place, these stubborn, brave Japanese people, and yet sooner or later their village would again be caught by a monstrous wave, and it is just as vulnerable today as it was two centuries ago, the houses the same shape and structure and set in just the same way, on the beach but with no windows to the sea.

I recognized it, every step, as we climbed down the narrow winding path to the village. Here were the houses, here the narrow streets not three feet wide, surely, down which no vehicle could pass, and scarcely two human beings. Down the worn stone steps we went to the sea, followed by twenty-nine children, exactly, for I counted them when we stopped at Toru’s house. There it was, too, the house just as I saw it in my book, and even Grandfather was there, a lively cheerful old face, peering at us over the wall. He was past his fishing days and his sons and grandsons now carried on. His wife was dead, he told us, and his daughter-in-law and granddaughter tended the house and dried and salted the fish and carried the water up from the well on the beach.

We sauntered about the village and with deep content, because it was so exactly right, the fishing nets drying on the shore, the houses nestled between the terraced hills, a small old cemetery on one of them. There was even a flight of stone steps which we could use as the entrance to Old Gentleman’s house on the mountain above. It was all impossibly true and right.

The hours had passed and it was time for luncheon. We ate at a restaurant famous for eel. There we climbed two flights of stairs to a big airy room where we ate broiled eel on rice and drank green tea and congratulated ourselves on our location for the film.

I feared to see our next location and I confessed my fear. It was to be the mansion of Old Gentleman, a scholar and a landlord, and could we find a family living in such a house who would be willing to lend it to us? There must be space and beauty and elegance, set in lovely gardens. I gave up hope privately and toyed with various makeshifts while we drove along a country road.

The impossible became the possible, however, as it does so often in Japan. The moment I saw the house from the road I knew it was Old Gentleman’s house, no matter who lived in it. I entered the gate and found myself in a lovely garden. There were no flowers, for Japanese gardens are seldom flower gardens. A path made of wide irregularly shaped stones led to the main entrance and on both sides evergreens, low shrubbery, ferns and orchids not in bloom, made a landscape. At the door a lady stood. She wore a handsome dark kimono and she bowed low. We bowed in return, to the best of our American ability, and I asked if I might see the rest of the garden. There was a pool, not large, but so designed that it presented the aspects of a lake. There was a bridge leading into a narrow path and a pavilion set among the trees. I saw everything from the point of view of Old Gentleman. It was exactly the sort of garden he would have, and I half expected to see him waiting in the house.

He did not appear, however. There was only the handsome lady who welcomed us into the house, and she led us from one room to another, each spacious and decorated with taste. The farmhouse was three hundred years old, but this was the landowner’s house and it was built only about forty years ago, to replace the older one. Old Gentleman, whoever he is, was a man of wealth and taste. These were his chosen pieces of furniture and the art objects in the tokonoma alcoves were his choices, too. Two of the rooms were furnished with carpets laid on top of the tatami and with chairs and tables, western style, but we ignored the modern aspects of Old Gentleman and stayed by his Japanese side.

Now the lady introduced us to her daughter, a young woman not half so pretty as the mother, and wearing western dress, which did not suit her. But she, too, was kind and I was touched and warmed to the heart when, after I had made my speech of appreciation, I heard them both protest that they considered it an honor to have their house used in my picture, and the lady said she would like some day to perform the tea ceremony for me. I accepted with thanks, and then she served tea in bowls so small that I knew the tea was precious before I tasted it. It was indeed the perfect tea, seldom set before westerners. I could not bear to drink it and have it gone, and yet it was so delicious, so far beyond any tea I usually taste, that I could not but sip it while I praised it. She was moved by my appreciation and brought in the small valuable teapot and poured thimblefuls of the elixir. It was of course the rare tea made from the first tender leaves of the tea plant in spring. An ounce of it costs an American dollar, which is much Japanese money. I am sure she did not serve it often even to Japanese guests. That she did so for us meant that she gave a gift. I received it as such.

And as we talked, I in English, she in Japanese, through an interpreter, she asked if she could record the conversation through an interpreter for her son, who is studying English. I said of course, and was amused to see concealed until now behind a couch a very modern tape recorder!

We said good-by at last, with many bows, promising to return soon, promising to be careful and break nothing in the house and spoil nothing in the garden. She was very gracious and begged me to leave the hotel and live with her, but I said I must stay with the company, thanking her all the same.

Now there remained the farmhouse and the empty beach to be seen. The beach could wait, for the day was darkening, but the farmhouse we must see. We drove past a village and between fields and road I recognized it. The farmhouse stood among terraces, itself built on a wide terrace, the road in front of it twenty feet above the rice paddy below. A wall of ancient brick ran across the front, but the wide wooden gate stood open and I walked into the world of my story book. Yes, this was the house, simple but spacious, wooden walls, rooms divided by shoji, a thatched roof so old that grass and flowers grew on it. Chickens, a goat, a little vegetable garden, some ornamental shrubbery, a few decorative rocks, a fine old-fashioned kitchen, a narrow veranda, a small pool for washing rice and vegetables, the farmer himself, a cheerful widower with a married daughter looking after him — it was exactly right. And, best of all, the farm family was friendly and eager to be helpful. When were we coming? Tomorrow? Good — good — the house was ours. Yes, they had electricity — and a pump in the kitchen, modern farm, the farmer said proudly. And he would be glad to have Americans see how he managed everything. Tea, please, before we left! It was night before he would let us go, and work began at seven o’clock the next day. Every hour of light is precious when a film is made on location.

The chickens, I noticed as I left, were of the most articulate variety. Only the darkness silenced them. Their dissonant cackling, their exclamations of excitement and outrage when we moved in the next day, were to be the background music of every scene we filmed at the farmhouse.

We were delayed, alas, and by rain — rain — rain. By the time we reached our hotel that night, the rain was falling. I had feared rain, always the hazard of filming on location, especially in the climate of southern Japan, where sea and mountain are close neighbors. If the wind blows from the sea the sky will clear; if from the land, it will rain. This I remembered from days long past, and while I lay in my Japanese bed listening to the rain and waiting for sleep, I pondered on the strange divisions of my life.

How incredible, above all, that for the whole first half of my life, I did not know he existed! When I was here before, where was he? And now when I am here again, where now is he? Between these two eras were twenty-five good years of life together, a gem set into eternity before and after. And the old question beset me again, as it besets every human being who has known death come too near. I set my teeth against the inexorability of death.

Is there life beyond?

I remembered the courage of his atheism. How often we argued of the future in which one of us must live alone! For it would have been too good to be possible that we should die at the same moment and hand in hand cross the invincible barrier. I had known for years that it would be I who would be left, I with the heritage of long-living ancestors on both sides of my family. The question was should I remind myself of the possibility of life beyond or thrust it aside and live as though eternity were now — which it is, in one sense, there being no beginning or end in the endlessness of all things. So what then is the present solitude in which I am living? Is it an end to what once was, or is it a beginning to something I do not yet comprehend?

Did he know I was here in Japan? Was he still hovering about the house at home, the essence of himself, and were I there would I perceive his presence? Lying there on my Japanese bed, the sound of the rising sea mingling with the rain on the tiled roof, I fought off the mighty yearning to go in search of him, wherever he was. For surely he was looking for me, too. We were ill at ease, always, when apart. But what are the pathways?

I remembered an evening at Sardi’s, in New York. I was with a friend from Hollywood, and for the first time I met his wife. While her husband talked shop with other guests, this woman talked to me rather shyly, a pleasant Midwestern woman, not at all of Hollywood. She was timid at first and then upon some impulse she lowered her voice to tell me that she wanted some “real talk” with me. She had had, it seemed, a strange personal development in recent months. Her father, to whom she was very close, had lived with her for many years after her mother died, but had himself recently died. She worried about him, wondering if he were still himself somewhere, and if so, if he were happy, and in such worry she became depressed and was joyless.

One evening, she said, when her husband was delayed at work, she was sitting alone at her crocheting, a pastime to which she was addicted, and as usual, grieving over her father. Suddenly she heard him call her name, and looking up she saw him quite clearly across the room.

“You must stop this worrying about me,” he had said in his usual practical voice. “I am all right — happy, in fact.”

“Were you afraid?” I asked her.

“Afraid of my father? No!”

“But was he the same?”

“Exactly the same,” she said, and then added, half puzzled, “Except I knew that, though he was there, his body wasn’t.

“And have you seen him again?”

“Yes,” she said, “several times, though I don’t worry any more. Sometimes when Jack and I are just sitting at home quietly of an evening, he reading and I crocheting, I’ll feel somebody else is there and I’ll see my father smiling at us.”

“Does Jack see him?” I asked.

“I asked him once, ‘Jack, do you see Dad over there?’ He said no, he didn’t see him, but he believed I did, because in the old country where he came from there were people like me who could see beyond.”

Yes, and remembering, I thought of what my fourteen-year-old daughter told me the day after the funeral. She had wanted his room after it was empty because it was next to mine and she slept there quite peacefully the first night, I remember, for I had asked her if she really wanted to sleep there so soon.

“I don’t want the room to be empty,” she said.

The next morning she said entirely naturally at breakfast, “Daddy came in last night. He looked wonderful — all well again and so cheerful. He just came back to see that everything was all right.”

I restrained incredibility. “Did he speak to you?”

“No, just smiled.”

“And what was he wearing?” I asked.

“I think it was his red velvet smoking jacket,” she said.

But the red smoking jacket, though his favorite, had been laid away five years ago when he forgot about smoking.

Do I believe? If I do it is only because I believe that some day we shall know as we are known, and communications will be clear, the laws of science revealing to us the laws that govern the creating universe. Religion calls the creative force by a name, God for whom we wait. En attendant Godot!

There in the darkness of the night by the Japanese sea, I besought him to let me know by some true sign that he lived somewhere, only to tell me that he was. He made no sign. Yet silence is not finality. It may be only definition. He is there, I am here. We do not have the same wave length yet. Is that faith? I dare not call it so. I am trained in science. There are two schools in the approach. One is to believe the impossible an absolute unless and until it is proved the possible. The other is to believe the possible an absolute unless and until it is proved the impossible. I belong to the latter school. Therefore all things are possible until they are proved impossible — and even the impossible may only be so, as of now.

In this way my life continued to be lived on two separate levels, one by day, the other by night; one upon Earth, the other in search of a habitation not made with hands.

The rains fell, it seemed endlessly. It poured for three days without letting up. The mountains were hidden in rain and the sea roared against the rocks. We looked at one another in alarm. What if this went on and on?

“I thought you said June was the rainy season and this is September,” the American said to me reproachfully.

I myself was somewhat startled by the downpour, and referred the matter to the Japanese maître d’hôtel, who said that June was always the rainy season.

“Then what is this?” I asked.

“It is just rain,” the Japanese replied.

No one could deny the fact and so we passed on to more disputable matters. We decided to work on the script, planning each day’s schedule, in case the rain stopped some day. Scene by scene and shot by shot we planned and we planned. It was necessary and constructive work, and I also learned what I did not know before, that for a motion picture one does not tell the story in time sequence. One shoots all the scenes at each location, regardless of where these belong in the narrative. Thus for the first four days we would stay at the farmhouse, shooting everything that had to do with the farmhouse and its family of four, Father, Mother, Yukio and Setsu. This seemed a confusing business to me, but I could see its logic.

We sat around the long low Japanese table together with our cameraman and our Japanese sound man and assistant to the director. We sat on the floor, of course, and the cameraman was so unwise as to choose one end of the low table. I say unwise because he has long legs, very long, and he could not stretch his legs out when he was tired of sitting on them, because I had already grown tired and my legs were already stretched out, crosswise, under the table.

Here I pause for a moment to discuss the matter of sitting on one’s folded legs. Before I came to Japan this year, after so long a time away, I practiced faithfully every day folding my legs and sitting on my feet. It is not easy and at first I could only do it for three minutes and at best only got to twenty minutes, which does not last through a Japanese dinner, at least not the kind my friends give me. I was ashamed, but it was the best I could do. What was my pleasure, therefore, to discover that in the years I had been away, the Japanese have all but given up prolonged sitting on their legs! Instead they sit on chairs whenever possible, and the children, many of them, do not sit on their legs at all and even my friend said frankly that she could not sit for long in the Japanese fashion and anyway she thought it bad for the circulation. She attributed the surprising increase in height of this generation of young adults to the fact that they have not had to sit for hours on their folded legs. It may be the reason. Certainly I noticed the new height of the Japanese. The people are better looking and they have straighter legs.

Now let me speak of the cameraman. First I must say that he was charming, kind, temperamental and, in his field, an artist. He spoke little English but he understood much more than we thought he did. He was obviously devoted to his work, and wanted us to know that he had a special devotion to The Big Wave, which I believed he had, else why should he have worked with us? He was famous and could easily have earned as much on an easier job. But I was enchanted with him for other reasons. He was the most spectacular-looking human being that I had ever seen, very tall and very narrow in the feet, legs, body, arms, and hands, neck and especially face. He had a long, low-slung jaw and — but I cannot explain his anatomy. I do not know how he came to look like that. All I know is that I liked him, and I enjoyed his spectacular looks. There was so much in that long face of his that I looked at him again and again across the table. It was a sad face, I thought, and then again I thought it was not, so I kept looking at it. And our Japanese assistant was such a contrast, a very modern young woman in shirt and slacks and with a beehive arrangement of hair. She spoke foreign languages and she had studied ballet in Europe and she was newly married to our leading young actor, the grown-up Toru. His motion picture commitments prevented his being with us until the twenty-first, and so this was their first separation. She was teased a good deal by other members of the cast, and they forced her to write hourly postcards to her bridegroom, addressing them for her, and so on. She lent herself good humoredly to their fun, a calm young woman, intelligent and efficient and, incidentally, but importantly, very much in love.

Alas, upon the very day when it stopped raining and we had begun filming our first scenes at the farmhouse, our cameraman fell into a rice paddy. This was not as mild an event as it sounds, for it came at the end of a twelve-hour day. I had left location a little early in order to attend to some Tokyo business by telephone and was summoned to the hospital. There I beheld the elongated cameraman stretched on a bench in the hall, waiting to be X-rayed. We feared the worst, for he fell not only into the rice paddy outside the farmhouse, but the rice paddy was at the foot of a stone wall upon which the road ran, and he fell not as I had imagined, into soft mud and high rice, but upon rocks at the bottom of the paddy. His frame could best be defined at any time as a collection of very long thin bones connected loosely by withered brown skin, and lying on the bench he looked eight feet long.

We exclaimed our alarm but he refused to share it, and was carried into the X-ray room against his will. In half an hour the doctor reported no broken bones, only a bruise. The cameraman himself came out looking as gay as possible with his sort of a face, expecting our admiration, which we gave. He looked very smart in a clean black-and-white yukata, he had also permitted the doctor to put his right arm into a sling but only until he got out of the hospital, for he insisted upon returning to the job. We rode back to the hotel with him and gave him numerous orders, through our interpreter, that he was to have an attendant who would carry his chair everywhere for him to sit upon, together with a fan, an umbrella, cool drink and fruit.

The cameraman listened to this without change of expression and added, “And beddo.”

We laughed and the indomitable old figure sat very straight on the front seat. We bade him good night at his hotel and so ended that day.

Here I must consult my notes, scratched on the pages of my script, and written everywhere and anywhere in the farmhouse, wherever the scene was being played.

The first note says, “Feather—”

Feather?

Ah yes, that is the scene where Toru lay in the long stupor after the tidal wave had struck, and mischievous little Setsu stole into the room and tickled him with a feather to wake him up. It was a pretty scene, interrupted by Mother who came in with eggs in a small basket, followed by our last addition to the cast, a small, very intelligent dog. A duck was the really last addition but he had not yet appeared on the set.

While this scene was taken, I saw Father in another corner rehearsing his big scene with Yukio. Father is a good farmer, his face an honest brown. Our make-up man, the best in Japan — or did I say that before? — was dabbing at Father’s face and delicately wiping away the sweat of concentration. Mother’s personal attendant was doing the same to her in another corner. The attendant provided us with laughter. She was so very efficient, rushing in at last moments before the camera began to call them, in order to set straight a hair on Mother’s head and to add a touch of make-up to the corner of her eye or the edge of her lip.

“When work is over,” my notes tell me, “it is a sight to see Mother in her elegant gray silk kimono wending her dignified way along the dirt road at the top of the wall above the paddy field. She is an actress of some distinction in Japan, Father acted in Teahouse of the August Moon, and Toru and Yukio are both child stars. I am proud of our Big Wave family.”

That was the day, I remember, when the postman brought me a letter from a Japanese friend in Tokyo, a fellow writer, who had taken the trouble to go to the public library and collect some data on tidal waves from old family records. He wrote me that before a tidal wave rolls in there is a dreadful hollow booming from the sea. The Japanese call it the “ocean gun.” And one sign of an approaching wave is that the wells go dry, or rise, and the water is muddy. And the fish, especially the catfish, swim toward land.

While I read the fascinating pages I heard the assistant director, a man, call the new scene.

“Yoi!”

“Hoomba!”

“Starto!”

“Backo!”

The actors took their places and the cameraman alerted. Then came the director’s final command.

“Action!”

“Schis-kani,” was said again and again during the scenes and I did not know what it meant until an electrician echoed it by roaring it in semi-English.

“Silento!”

The result was profound silence. And I was amazed by the simplicity of the mechanism. The microphone was something tied up in a cotton bag and suspended at the end of a bamboo pole and the end of the pole was always sticking into someone, as my own ribs could testify, but it worked well enough. When I listened to the sound track played back, I was surprised to hear how clear it was. Effects were achieved with strangely simple means. The camera, for example, was wrapped up as tenderly as a baby in a snowstorm in Central Park. I could not think why, for the weather was steaming hot, and surely the thing was not cold. Upon inquiry I learned that the blankets and quilts were to silence the noise of the camera itself so that the microphone would not pick it up.

Can it be that I have forgotten to tell how the city of Obama celebrated our arrival? Ah, but it took a little time. We arrived without pomp or circumstance in small Japanese cars, we unloaded ourselves and settled unobtrusively into the hotel. Moreover, we were all Japanese except the American director, his wife and child, and myself, and we were quiet folk, for Americans at least. In a day or two, however, word went about that we were there, that I was there, that a picture was to be made. The city fathers asked permission to call upon us, and we let them with pleasure. They came bearing huge bouquets of mixed flowers and with gifts of enormous flat sponge cakes, a specialty of Nagasaki, the nearest city. We invited them to drink tea with us, they accepted with pleasure, and begged us, through interpreters, to ask them for anything we needed.

“If you do not ask,” they told us, “we will not know. Therefore ask!”

We promised, and tea drunk, they bowed and we bowed, and thus we parted.

The next day a large banner was hung on the wall of the main street, which in English and Japanese welcomed us to the city of Obama. The hotel, not to be outdone, made a similar banner, photographers took our pictures holding bouquets, and banners continued to wave during our entire stay. As time passed, a few letters faded in the sudden rains to which we were liable and in general the banners took on a spotted appearance, but the welcome, I am happy to say, remained as warm as ever.

And speaking of letters, I am reminded that Japanese school children are condemned to learn three languages, all Japanese. One is the ancient Chinese still used in formal writing, one Japanese phonetics, and the third the new language necessary in modern times, which is phonetic for English words incorporated into the Japanese tongue.

In spite of this linguistic burden, the children looked healthy and happy all day long except for the boy I saw on the way to our village, Kitsu. We turned an unexpected corner one day and came upon a robust and irate mother spanking the boy for some wrongdoing. She finished the job, in spite of our appearance, the boy howling as loudly as possible, then she dusted her hands, smiled at us cheerfully while the boy retired to a corner of the wall to finish off his sobs, and went back to her housework.

Should one spank children? I lingered behind the others on the narrow hillside path while I pondered the question. It was an old one in our American family, never settled. He said he believed in spanking children at certain ages because they were not open to reason and functioned entirely on instinct and emotion. I said I hated all physical punishment and believed it did no good. The difference between us was that when a child provoked me to anger, which in fairness to myself I must say was not often and only after outrageous provocation, I could and did find myself administering a swift and well-placed spanking. He, in spite of his belief in the principle, never had the heart to spank any child for any cause — except on one momentous occasion when I refused to have anything to do with it.

“The boys should be spanked,” he told me one day, his face very grave.

I do not remember what they had done, but they had got into some devilishness together. They stood before us one fine summer’s day, the three of them so near of an age, all handsome and healthy and unrepentant.

“I can’t do it,” I said.

“Then I will have to,” he said firmly.

To our mutual astonishment, mine and the boys’, he actually spanked each of them in turn. Grown men that they are now, they still roar with laughter when they talk of it together. They too do not remember what naughtiness they committed, but him they remember with love and amusement.

“We knew we ought to cry,” the second son says, he with the gay sense of humor. “Just for his sake we should have cried, so that he’d have the satisfaction of knowing he was doing a good job, but it was so damned funny — we had to laugh.”

I remember some sort of muffled noise and a pretense of rubbing their eyes with their knuckles and I was not fooled for one second. I knew they were laughing, bless them, and trying not to, because they did not want to hurt his feelings.

I suspected the Japanese boy of somewhat the same pretense. She was not hitting him very hard, and he was making a noise out of all proportion. Let my mother enjoy herself, he was thinking — Let her believe she is doing me good. … Let us, in short, be kind to our parents!

That evening, at my solitary dinner — it was a great scarlet crab — I found myself laughing aloud as I remembered. It was the first time I had laughed spontaneously alone since we used to laugh together and it was another milestone toward my new life.

The farmhouse was our first location and we worked there for days, each day like the one before. This was the pattern: I woke at half past five and went downstairs for my bath. The little maid, always watchful, needed no summons. While I was out of my room she came in and folded away the bed, set out the table and the cushion seat, and brought in my breakfast. This was, I must confess, the least successful meal of the day, made tolerable only by a special fruit that looked like an apple, but was a pear, not of the soft American variety but the crisp Chinese one. Two boiled eggs, thick toast and strange coffee completed the menu. I explained that I ate only one egg at breakfast and only one slice of toast, but explanations meant nothing. The company manager had ordered what I was to have and what he had commanded appeared. I suppose the little maid finished off the surplus, and I let it go at that.

In any case I had to be at the front door by seven o’clock. There we all gathered to exchange our slippers for our shoes, little maids waiting to help. Then we filled several cars, bowed to the assembled company of maids who waited to bow us away, and so we were off. The streets were clean, as everything is in Japan, the dust laid with fresh water and the cobblestones gleaming. The mountains pressing closely upon the sea were brightly green and the sea sparkled blue under the morning sun, if the day were fair. We drove through the city at reckless speed, passing hundreds of gaily dressed school children and out into the country on graveled roads between fields of ripening rice. There are times when I think Japan is the most beautiful country in the world. Yet it is the enchantment of Asia that every country is beautiful in its own way. We say Asia, and think in terms of a vast and swarming continent, the people indistinguishable one from another, but nothing can be more mistaken. The countries and peoples of Asia are as different one from the other as they can possibly be — more different than Americans are from Europeans. “That’s for sure,” as my Pennsylvania Dutch neighbors say. True, India and China are the two great mother civilizations, and their influence spreads into the neighboring lands and cultures, yet each land and each culture, acknowledging the influence, has nevertheless developed with individual and peculiar grace.

Arriving at the farmhouse, an appreciative audience awaiting us, we entered the gate every morning and found everything ready for us. The family had got up, put away their beds, made breakfast and departed for the day. From time to time some of them would come and see what we were doing, but courtesy forbade comment, whatever they thought. The surrounding villagers, however, frankly came to stare and they came in relays.

The first crowd, the early one, was always school children. Obviously they had risen early and were stopping on their way to school. They were mannerly and silent, their eyes unblinking. Precisely at a quarter past eight they left us in a body to begin school at half past. The next contingent were mothers, who by this time had put their houses in order and planned lunch. They arrived with babies strapped to their backs, and were not quite so mannerly. They could not refrain from whispered exclamations and laughter smothered behind their hands. They left, also promptly, at half past eleven in order to see that their working husbands were fed. About three o’clock grandparents and village elders arrived, after food and naps, to spend the rest of the afternoon with us. They were joined at five by the working fathers, whose day was done. These stayed with us faithfully until we left about seven.

On our part, we began filming as soon as the cameras were set up, moving from room to room as the story required. The make-up man and his assistant kept a zealous watch on the actors, lest the heat cause cream and rouge to run in rivulets down their faces and spot their costumes — a true artist and a charming man, our make-up man, with his secret formulas and brushes made by his own hands. I found one of those fine brushes on the beach after the work was over, and he had gone back to Tokyo, and I kept it for memory’s sake. It is made of bamboo, splinter fine, and set with a narrow line of the best bristles.

Sound effects, throughout the day, were our bane. The ox lowed at the wrong time, the goat baa-ed too often, though merely to be friendly. As for the chickens, we gave up on them. Nothing could restrain them and consequently they will cackle happily throughout the farmhouse scenes wherever the film is shown.

The day’s work went on until luncheon arrived from the hotel and we broke for an hour. The heat was frightening in August and we sat under the big persimmon tree in the front yard, a small space between the massive gate and the house, but there we all sat, some on the rise of the house, some on stones and stumps and sides of the cart. Each lunch was served separately and self-contained in a handsome lacquered box, the top layer containing fish and bits of browned meat, vegetable and pickle, and the bottom layer steamed white rice. Great pots of tea, with handles wrapped against the heat in thin strips of bamboo, completed our more than adequate meal. We ate with Japanese chopsticks, bamboo, sealed in waxed paper and thrown away after each use, surely the most sanitary eating utensils in the world.

In twenty minutes the meal was over and for the rest of the noon hour the farmhouse was quiet. Crew and actors were stretched out on the tatami, like sardines, asleep. I found a quiet ledge behind a little table, close by the back room, and lay looking out at the mountains lifted against the sky. White clouds floated against the blue and cast their floating shadows. It seemed a dream that I was here, that I was seeing my little book come to life in the country where it was conceived, my people now living Japanese people playing out my story.

That August heat! How restless the wild creatures were! Across the human voices the loud and ardent screech of a cicada shocked our sound man again and again. For me, it was a cry that summoned nostalgic memory of the hot summers of my childhood on the banks of the Yangtze River. Whenever the cicadas gave their screeching, seesawing cries, one knew that the summer was at its height. From then on we could only hope some day for a cool wind, even for a typhoon. The sound man, however, was furious with the cicada in the farmhouse yard. He shouted and half a dozen of the crew leaped at the big persimmon tree and knocked its branches with bamboo poles. For five minutes the lusty insect was quiet and then we heard its screech begin to saw the air. This time the men climbed the persimmon tree and shook it until leaves began to fall and the green fruit trembled. For at least half an hour the cicada was prudent and then it began all over again its endless song. But we were beset with other creatures. A proud cock announced the birth of every egg his harem laid. Chicks quarreled and squawked. Among the ever-watching crowd, a baby cried and had to be removed.

One day we had a bit of luck. As our little Setsu came flying out of the farmhouse gate, her kimono sleeves her wings, the oldest woman in the world chanced to come by, bent under a load of sticks of firewood. She had a beautiful old face, wrinkled and brown, but her eyes were as young as life itself. We invited her to be in our picture, she accepted graciously and posed, straightening herself for the occasion and clinging to her tall staff while her gay old face assumed nobility. Our assistant make-up man in mistaken zeal rushed to arrange the folds of her kimono, which had fallen open to show a glimpse of ancient breasts, but we shouted at him to put it as it was before, and so we have her picture. She is walking along the road, bent under her load while the child Setsu runs past. We wanted to pay her, but were assured that it would hurt her feelings. The most that could be done with dignity was to give her some packages of cigarettes, which we did, and she went her way.

Rain and sun alternated through the days. Our actors worked well and they became a working group. We began to express the characters and we lived in the story. I remember one day that ended with the bringing home of Toru, after the tidal wave, when the young lad waked from his stupor, and inquired where his father was and where his mother. A sudden comprehending emotion swept the actors together. They knew, they understood all too well. Tears fell from the actress mother’s eyes, and I felt a catch in my own throat for suddenly they had portrayed a moment of utter reality.

The last scene of that burning day was outside in the barnyard. It was nearly twilight, the crowd was now several hundred people of all ages. They ringed us around, always quiet and respectful, while the actors prepared the set, complete with cart, ox, produce and farm family. This time our family included Setsu’s pet duck and her dog. The duck, which in the script is a little duck, in reality turned out to be a huge duck, the great-grandfather of all living ducks, and when our Setsu struggled to hold him under her arms I was reminded of Alice in Wonderland and the flamingo in the croquet game with the Duchess. The dog, a gay fox terrier type — although the tail was wrong, so I did not know quite what it was — would not gambol about harmlessly as it was supposed to do, but insisted upon chasing chickens madly, thereby upsetting a mother hen with a large family of chicks, not to mention an unknown number of white pullets, who apparently had never seen a dog before. The duck was carried off stage by Setsu, and the dog controlled and chastened and the scene proceeded.

At this moment I heard human cackles behind me as Father unloaded the cart. The cackles were hoots of laughter from two dirt farmers in the crowd who were overcome with amusement at Father’s unrealistic handling of the pole and two baskets. They obviously did not believe in him as a fanner. As for Mother, when she appeared it was the women’s turn to laugh. Not one of them was pretty, and Mother was pretty. So how could she be a farmer’s wife? It was a question. Perhaps Mother was too pretty. But can a woman be too pretty in a movie?

The scene was over at last and we were getting ready for the next one, rushing against the darkness falling so fast in this hot climate, when suddenly I heard loud barks, as though from an immense and aged dog. I could not imagine what it was. There was no dog indigenous to the farm. I advanced to the stable to investigate and I smelled pig. It could not be pig, because it barked like dog. But it was pig, an enormous tough-looking old pig, male gender, barking like a cross old dog. I inquired through an interpreter why the pig barked like a dog when he was not a dog. The answer was simple. “We do not know why pig barks like dog.” That was all. The pig continued to bark, the darkness fell, the assistant cameraman announced that we could not finish the next scene because the light on the mountain had faded. We gathered ourselves together and left. The pig stopped barking, the crowd ebbed away into the night, and we ebbed, too. Another day had passed. Tomorrow was a Sunday and we were to rest, although we had been warned that we were not to expect more Sundays off. From now on it was seven days a week, twelve hours a day. Sufficient unto the day — I thought only of bath and bed. Japanese bath and Japanese bed.

Such a wind arose in the night that I dreamed we were having a typhoon. The dream was a remnant of childhood, I suppose, or of former life upon the island, or perhaps only of The Big Wave itself, created by my own mind. Perhaps it was no more than a conversation the night before with the innkeeper’s wife. This inn, she told me, had often been struck by typhoons, the last only last year, when the sea rushed into this very room, where I lived. At any rate, I woke, listening to the wind, and I remembered an August afternoon, long ago. I had stood upon a mountainside facing the sea, south of Japan. A typhoon was brewing somewhere over the horizon. We had been given warning and in all common sense I should have been safe inside a house with the windows battened down and the doors barred. No one knows what a typhoon will do. It is uncontrolled and therefore unpredictable. It is a release of senseless force and its only accomplishment is destruction.

I had seen many typhoons, however, in my Asian childhood and I had the wish, that day, to see one more. A typhoon is very much like a hurricane but the hurricanes I had seen in New England and Pennsylvania were not typhoons. The tropics or near tropics provide a volcanic power for wind and rain. We lived in a sub-tropical climate two hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean, and yet to this day I can remember my father’s stern command and my mother’s anxious face.

“There’s a typhoon coming! Get the shutters barred and the doors locked!”

While the sky darkened and the first low growl of the winds rose into a sullen roar, we sat waiting and listening. Trees would break and walls would crumble and the house itself would quiver when the attack came, but we could do nothing except wait and listen. When it was over and silence fell at last, we opened the doors and windows. What we saw was always the same — destruction everywhere.

“Stupid,” my mother would say. “So stupid!”

It was the memory of her invariable comment that had given me the idea of the typhoon for a story, and had sent me to the mountainside that morning long ago on a previous visit to Japan. The radio had announced a typhoon.

It had come just after one o’clock, preceded by a strange distant sound over the lifting horizon. I had taken shelter under the rock of what was a sort of cave, having made sure that this rock was part of the spine of the mountain and not some treacherous boulder to crash down upon me in the storm. I had made sure, too, that I was high enough on the mountain so that the sea could not reach me. And I had to take heed that there were no trees near by to fall upon me. All in all, I was as safe as a person could be who had decided upon risk.

There I sat, then waiting but this time alone and without family or house to shelter me. It was a profound experience, terrifying and rewarding, and it provided the scene I wanted for the beginning of the story. Let me describe it as best I can. The typhoon came out of the sea first as a deep hollow roar. Then it appeared as a monstrous black cloud. The cloud seemed a thing alive, shaping itself this way and that, torn by contending winds. However it might stretch to right or left, it continued to spread upward and reach toward east and west. The day darkened to twilight and the dreaded roar of sound came rushing toward me from out of the depths. I crouched behind my rock and waited.

At first, I remember, there was no rain, only the wild winds and the tossing sea. An hour earlier the sea had been calm and blue. Now it was black and streaked with crests of white foam. When the rain came it was all of a sudden, as though the clouds had opened and spilled. A curtain of rain fell between mountain and sea, a solid sheet of water three feet away from me. The grass and brush on the mountainside flattened under the wind and the rain. I was surrounded by the madness, the unreason, of uncontrolled, undisciplined energy. None of this made any sense. It was worse than useless — it was nature destroying its own creation — its own self. To create by the long process of growth and then to destroy by a fit of wild emotion — was this not madness, was this not unreason? I had the beginning of my story.

The storm spent itself at last. The winds dispersed, the rain slackened to a drizzle and a mist, the cloud fell apart and the sun shone through. I came out from my shelter and surveyed the ruin left behind. Trees had fallen on the lower levels, gullies were dug into the earth between the rocks, the very grass and underbrush lay flat and exhausted. I could only guess what havoc had been wreaked upon the villages along the coast, the fishing boats broken and tossed out to sea, houses smashed, breakwaters wrenched apart, sea walls crumbled. It was, as my mother had said, all very stupid. It was useless.

I have seen this same waste take place in human life, in human beings, in terms of human emotions.

I lay there in my Japanese bed, years later, and mused on the similarity of typhoon energy and energy of human emotion. Uncontrolled, it destroys. But must emotion be destructive? And if not, when is it valuable and why? How can we use emotion as helpful energy, necessary energy for living? What are the uses of emotion and what are the disciplines necessary for its helpful use? These were the questions I longed to answer, first for myself and then for others. I put myself first for I am the lens through which I view others.

And as always, when I cannot answer my own questions, I send my mind, my heart, in search of him. He could not answer, not always, but he had a talent for directing the search by questions of his own, skillful and enlarging. His was not a profound mind. I cannot pretend that he could always follow me in the search to the conclusions that come one by one, through which one proceeds not as absolutes but as steps toward truth. Truth itself is, of course, no absolute. Perhaps, indeed, it pervades the process, existing in everything and everywhere as eternally as time itself, a wholeness of which at any stage we see only part. He did not possess the conceptual mind nor had he the scholar’s disciplines, in which I have been trained. It was understood that there was much that we could not share. Our natures were essentially different. Our enjoyments even in music and literature were unlike. We both loved music, for example, but I am happiest when I am working on a Beethoven sonata or with Chopin. He enjoyed lighter music, which I also enjoy, but only as caviar. On the other hand I am deeply interested in jazz, not so much musically as psychologically, and he had no interest in jazz on any terms. He had no interest, either, in science, although he did have an academic interest in technology. Since he was a determined atheist, he could accept but not share my unending involvement with theoretician physicists, and the tremendous significance of their recent discoveries.

What he did have was a brilliant intuitive mind, and what was more rare, the ability to appreciate what he could not comprehend. He stimulated by skillful questions, he seemed never to lead although he did not follow, he uncovered without shaping. He provided an atmosphere in which I could think more clearly, create more spontaneously than I might otherwise have been able to do. He could listen to me think aloud around and above and under a subject that interested me, allowing me to range freely as though I were alone, his questions never guideposts but invitations to pathways I might not have noticed for myself.

I realize that now, alas, I have no one with whom to talk. Be still, my soul!

The schedule called for outdoor work, a picnic scene with little Setsu and a harvest scene, then field and plowing but it was raining again. We proceeded nevertheless to within walking distance of the site, a charming place on a terraced hillside, and in the background a gray old Japanese cemetery. It was upon one of these stone graves that Setsu was to wait with food for Father and Yukio, with what disastrous and naughty results I must not here tell. The contrast of the mossy old tombstones and our pretty little girl was the contrast of life against death and I had looked forward to the scene. We waited in the cars while the rain poured down. A kind farm family invited us to shelter in their comfortable house, and we went in, gratefully. The farm wife prepared tea for us, and we discussed what to do. Mountains and sea here combined to make weather a mystery even more uncertain than in most parts of the world. The sky looked as though it would continue to empty itself for forty days. We decided to go to the farmhouse and shoot a rain scene, appropriately, and a kitchen interior. The assistant director was to go to Kitsu, our fishing village, and get boats ready for the scene when the boats put out for the shark beach in the rain.

The morning was a disappointment, nevertheless. The rain continued into deluge. The farmyard became a lake of mud and the thatched eaves dripped dismally. Inside the farmhouse the crew worked without enthusiasm. The cameraman put off evil moments of beginning work, the director grew impatient and I grew bored. Again and again the first scene was set and again and again the camera made some monstrous mistake. It was twelve o’clock by the time we were ready to shoot the rain scene, and then the sun came out, weakly but enough to make it necessary to fake rain. So on a rainy day the men climbed on the farmhouse roof and rigged up the best rainmaking machine in the world, namely, a hollow bamboo pierced with holes, with a rubber hose attached to one end and the other end stopped. A beautiful flow of fake rain dripped over the eaves and down into the lake of mud made by the real rain. Finally we got a take, and lunch hour arrived. The day was so dismal it was not even a good lunch.

The kitchen scene and the rainy beach scene were among our best. The kitchen scene was the earthquake. Our farm mother, in a daze, hurried about, trying to save her dishes. She was so distraught that she forgot to put down a basket of eggs and they broke and increased the confusion. There is, in fact, nothing more confusing than a basket of broken eggs, especially when a woman forgets to put them down before she rushes around her kitchen trying to save her dishes during an earthquake, and sees in addition that the oil lamp is burning and may set the house on fire. It was quite a scene and in her reality of acting our mother cut her foot twice on broken glass and the trained nurse, whom we were required to have with us at all times, at last had a chance to save someone’s life. She came forward with an air of importance and put some adhesive tape on Mother’s foot. We were impressed by this efficiency and felt somewhat cheered.

Sheer stubbornness prevented me from giving up and wending my muddy way back to the hotel, and I was glad. With that inexplicable upturn which seems inevitable when the worst arrives, the afternoon work suddenly became exciting. The farmhouse actors were dismissed for the day and the fisherman’s family summoned for the beach scenes. The rainy scene finished, the sun had withdrawn and again rain fell in deluge. It became apparent now that the American director had every intention of dismissing me, too, on the grounds of the storm, rain, lashing waves and so forth. When I declined to be dismissed he put forth vague suggestions that I might break a leg or something on the steep and narrow path down to Kitsu, and he had had enough of falls. I refused this ridiculous reasoning, for my two favorite houses are in the countryside of Pennsylvania and the mountains of Vermont, and I walk prodigiously everywhere and climb like a goat — female — and never have slipped or fallen, unless someone dropped me as a baby, which I do not remember. I invited this director to pay no attention to me except to check before going back to the hotel in the evening in order to see that I was in some car or other, and so I went to Kitsu.

I shall never cease to be grateful that I did, for the experience gave me — well, here it is:

I walked down the narrow winding cliff path without mishap, and descended to the beach, ostentatiously and unobtrusively pretending that I was not there. It was raining gloriously, a rough downpour, which I love. I was protected thoroughly by my raincoat and hat, and also by various umbrellas held over my head by kind villagers. My only complaint in Japan is that people are so kind that I always find an umbrella over my head, a fan in my hand, and a stool where I sit. While the director shaped up his scene and peered into the camera, I stood with my back to the high wall in front of Toru’s house and gazed out over the gray sea and gray sky. Our actor, Toru’s father, was a fisherman, and at the signal he began to blow the great conch shell for the boats.

“Cut!” the director yelled.

We cut. All the village was out under huge umbrellas to watch what was going on and some unwary boy had dashed across the scene to a better place on the other side. The village headman, who was our paid ally, had forbidden noise or movement, and at this he went into a fine paroxysm of fury. I speak and understand no Japanese, but I could see that he was calling his fellow villagers a lot of damned blockheads and did they want to show the world what idiots they were, not knowing that when you cross a camera you ruin the picture being made by Americans here in the village of Kitsu for the first time in history, a place unknown to the world until now as the home of children and fools? They all grinned sheepishly and fell back six inches or so. Suddenly another boy who had not been listening dashed between the frightfully bowed and hairy legs of the headman himself, not remembering to fold his umbrella first. The results were disastrous, the umbrella was ruined.

Here I pause for a moment to remember fondly that headman in the village of Kitsu. He had a round, shaven head, a rugged, beaming face, legs as crooked as a crab’s, an iron will, and a heart fit for a king. He was a dictator, of course, and he ruled his people absolutely. Every night he told them what they could do the next day and what they must not do. Thus after the reprehensible behavior of the boys, the villagers were forbidden to stare at us or hang about. They were to continue their usual duties as though we were not there, except, as a special favor, for one hour between five and six in late afternoon and then they must stand no nearer than fifty feet away to watch us, and in total silence. His enthusiasm for the picture was touching for he was convinced that the story is about him. Like Toru, his entire family was swept away by a tidal wave when he was only a little boy.

Standing there, my back against the wet sea wall, I watched the cameraman get a lovely shot of fishermen carrying their nets and running down to the sea and putting off in their fishing boats through the waves and rain. Camera then raced to the big breakwater, which made an ideal platform from which to film the boats driving into the open sea. The villagers rushed after the camera and I was swallowed among the crowd. I was all but pushed off the breakwater into the sea, which would have made the director so eternally right that I daresay I would have had to take the next plane home in order to escape the wrath of God. But I was fortunately saved by a strong villager who breathed warmly into my face — he had halitosis, alas, and of the fiercest sort, a pity, for he was such a nice man. He told me, breathing hard, that he saw me on the Tokyo television and may he hold his umbrella over my head, and why isn’t someone looking after such an important person as I am? I said that no one ever looked after me when pictures were being made, and thanks, I don’t need the umbrella because I have a rain hat and so I escaped him to go and sit upon a stone pier and watch the matchless beauty of Japanese fishing boats putting out to open sea.

I slap all the dull routine of their being told to come back and do it over again because of the cameraman’s locking the camera so that he could not pan and then his thinking something was wrong with the camera and the American saying bitterly that the only thing wrong was the cameraman, and all such small talk. Let me tell only of sitting there in the rain, that slanting rain which Hokusai loved so well to portray in his prints. Surrounded by the green and terraced hills and the higher mountains swathed in clouds, and gazing out over the endless sea, I watched for the boats to return and saw them as they rounded the end of the breakwater. How beautiful they were, how superb in shape and speed and grace! Three men sat in each boat, all rowing, not the choppy rowing of western boats, but smoothly as a fish swims, these rowers never lifted their oars from the water. I studied the rhythm of those oars. It was in contrapuntal thirds, no oar moving at exactly the same instant as the other, and yet all movement flowing. Suddenly I recognized the rhythm — it was that of the fins of a fish. The boats moved through the sea as a fish moves by its fins. I felt the deep satisfaction of right conclusion. That is exactly what it was and I was slow not to know it until this late date in my life, although I have been watching such boats since I was a child, spending my summers in Japan.

The boats put out to sea again in a long row. They turned to the left as the bay turns until they were hidden by a rocky point, upon which stood by accident the figure of a man, solitary and unknown, looking toward the horizon. What beauty! It is enough for this day. I thank God, and may I see beauty all my life as clear as this!

I went back in grateful silence, I remember, and had my bath and dinner. The bathroom was big and two small windows, opaquely glazed, opened to the pool outside. I could hear the swimmers shouting and laughing while I bathed. Floor and walls of white tile, and the tub was a square of tiled cement four feet square and as deep, one end raised to make a seat and so keep my head above water. It was always full of hot mineral water, soothing to the skin. But why do I talk of the tub? I knew better than to step into it without the proper preparation, which was to fill a small wooden tub with water, sit upon a small bamboo stool in the middle of the tiled floor with the little tub before me, soap myself thoroughly, and pour water over myself. Only then was I fit for the big tub. When I stepped out of it every ache and touch of fatigue was gone. I was mended, and I was renewed.

That evening I sat by my window, I remember, dressed in a cool yukata, and heard the swimmers in the pool outside plunge and shout and laugh. I had that day been steeped in beauty, and now it was unbearable because I could not tell him about it. Perhaps he knew — but if he could not communicate his awareness to me, how was I to be comforted? I had, I thought, been doing so well and suddenly I knew I had not.

“It does not get better,” a widowed friend had warned me. “It gets worse.”

What does worse mean? How could it be worse than this? I wanted suddenly to wipe away all remembrance of beauty, and yet I am one who cannot live without beauty — and I do not allow myself to weep. I thought I had been doing well. I felt he must be proud of me, if he were watching somewhere, afar off. Now I needed help again and badly. Where to find it? Beauty had undone me, had made me weak with longing. Strangers must again be my refuge. I took off the yukata, slipped into my own dress and went to wandering on the streets again, alone.

Not far from the back door of the hotel, down a narrow cobbled street, I discovered the motion picture theater. It was the only one in town, and a very good one, the stage spacious, the seats comfortable. As a courtesy, the owner had sent word that we were to enter without tickets so long as we were in Obama, and as the days passed I grew into the habit of slipping across the street in the cool of the night, and choosing a seat beside a red-lacquered pillar. Around me were the Japanese crowd, mostly men, since there were no bars in Obama and this was perhaps their only relief from crying children and over-burdened wives. True, there were three old geisha in the city but they were more or less honorary and had become respectable members of the community now that they had retired from active business. Certainly they could not be considered sources of relaxation for tired business men.

The pictures were revelatory. The mildest and most artistic films in Japan, I fear, are those sent abroad for foreign consumption. The real stuff is kept at home and especially for the remoter areas, of which we in Obama were certainly one. Emotions on the screen were violent, primitive, repetitive and for me highly amusing. Everything was over-colored, literally as well as symbolically. The reds were the color of blood, the greens poisonous, the blues sulphurous. Equally extreme was the action. One rape was never enough for a single film. I sat through evenings when the same girl was raped two and three times by one man or by various men. Gun shooting, obviously copied from our wild-western shows, was far more wild. Everybody shot everybody until only one man remained and then he shot himself. A good evening’s entertainment seemed to be when all the women were raped and all the men killed. The audience then gave a sigh of happiness and rose in a state of dream to return to their wives and children. Yet these same men were always delicately courteous to a stranger and gently polite to one another. The Japanese nature is not so much complex as simply contradictory.

Reflecting upon the raw emotions I observed without sharing, it seemed to me that jealousy was the predominant passion, with rape and murder the inevitable result. I would laugh at this, except that I now recall an incident in my own household, known as the Affair of the Wooden Plate.

We went to Scandinavia one year, he and I, on a combined pleasure and business trip and stopped in Copenhagen to visit some friends. At dinner on our first night I admired some beautiful wooden plates and expressed a desire to purchase a dozen for our Pennsylvania home. This I did, the very next morning, and had them sent off direct. When we reached home the twelve wooden plates were already there, unpacked and waiting, and they were even more beautiful than I had remembered, and we used them at our first breakfast. The children had got up earlier that morning and had breakfasted with their nurse, since we had arrived late the night before. There were only the two of us then, he and I.

For years after that breakfast my children, my housekeeper, and other odd persons persisted in asking me why there were only eleven wooden plates and for years I was vague in my replies. Eleven plates? Were they sure there were only eleven plates? I must count them myself — et cetera.

The truth is that I knew there were only eleven wooden plates. When he and I began breakfast that morning there were twelve but when we finished there were eleven. This is how it happened — and I begin by saying that it is wonderful and by the grace of God that a fault in one’s beloved is no impediment to true love. Thus I acknowledge that this was his only fault — or nearly his only one, except that, as I have said he could not hammer a nail without banging his thumb black and blue, so that he sensibly followed my advice and gave up hammers entirely. This only fault then, was jealousy! At first it made me laugh, since I have never understood jealousy. If he, for example, had fallen in love with someone other than me, or had simply been temporarily attracted, I cannot imagine myself being jealous. If the beloved can find something better than he already possesses, how can one have the heart to deprive him of that joy? As for temporary attraction — well, one can always think about something else while it goes on and there are many enjoyable pursuits for which life provides all too little time. Music can fill twenty-four hours a day, so can sculpture and gardening, especially roses and camellias — so can reading and writing and improving the looks of one’s house and walking through the woods and motoring and flying and swimming and sailing in ships and, above all, conversation with interesting persons.

Alas, it was the last occupation which caused the trouble. I cannot resist interesting persons and some of these are men, though whether they be men or women is not the point with me. A good mind is equally fascinating whether the containing skull box be male or female. Not so with him. He, the calmest and coolest and wisest of men, could be absurdly jealous if the brain that attracted me were in the skull of a man. I say absurd, for that is how it appeared to me at first. I had no intention of limiting conversation to women and said so. I made a joke of the whole thing, but he did not laugh. This astonished me and then annoyed me, but I concealed my annoyance as gracefully as I could.

During our journey in Europe he had been better than usual, and I had talked with many interesting people without thinking of consequences. On that particular first morning home we talked as we ate, laughed over certain past events, and enjoyed ourselves as usual. It was a lovely morning, the sun shone on our breakfast table, the bowl of roses spread their fragrance, and we had our own fresh eggs and homemade bacon. I had just admired the effect of the bacon and eggs on our Chinese blue plates under which were the wooden plates we had bought in Copenhagen, whereupon that dear and usually predictable man looked at me across the table and stopped laughing. I looked at him, surprised, and saw his heavenly blue eyes begin to turn green.

“What is wrong?” I exclaimed.

“These plates,” he said. “They remind me of that day in Copenhagen.”

“So why—” I began and was stopped.

His voice was steel cold. “The way you talked to — the way you smiled at—”

Now I stopped him, but not by words, I was far too furious for that. I am not an angry woman, nor a contentious one, nor argumentative. I am called soft-spoken, I believe, by newspaper reporters. They are right. I am soft-spoken and even gentle, in a tough sort of way. Also I was trained in the Confucian tradition that a superior person never speaks or acts in anger. That morning, however, and at that moment, I forgot all about Confucius and superior persons. True, I did not speak in anger because I was too angry to speak at all. I went blind and dumb with anger and purely by instinct I lifted the wooden plate with blue china plate, and my bacon and eggs upon it, and smashed it on the floor. The destruction was total, for our dining room has a brick floor. Then I walked out of the house and across the meadows and down into the woods. There I sat on a log by the brook. I sat there for three hours and thought over my whole life, examined my marriage, and weighed the advantages and disadvantages of being in love. By that time all anger had departed, I could laugh, and was fit to live with again. I walked back home refreshed and hungry, since I had not eaten my breakfast before anger. I found him sitting grimly at his desk, trying to work, and I could see clearly enough that he had been exhausted by not coming to find me. We flew into each other’s arms, he stammering something about forgiveness, but I would have none of that. When we were calm again, he said so humbly that my heart half broke, for humility was never a part of his nature,

“Shall I write to—”

“Don’t mention his name,” I said in sympathy.

“But shan’t I order another wooden plate?” he asked, still humble.

“No,” I said. “Let there be eleven wooden plates forevermore. Because if you should, just once, forget, I’ll count the plates out loud for you to hear — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten—eleven!”

The end of this story is that we lived happily ever after and I never had to count the plates again, not even once. And I have continued all interesting conversations everywhere in the world and with anyone.

The day we changed location to the mansion that was Old Gentleman’s house was one of the perfect days. Sometime after midnight I woke to a new air. The heavy heat of the land wind was changed suddenly by a west wind from the sea. This air was crisp and clean and meant sunshine in the morning. To such a morning we woke. The mountains were free of mists, the sun was shining, the world was new. We climbed into waiting cars, sharply on time, and drove along the cliffs to Old Gentleman’s house. Far below us, as we made the big curve, fishing boats were drawing in the nets, a circle of white dots pulling closer and closer. I say the big curve, for the road seemed always to overhang the cliffs. Just at the point of the curve there was a shrine, and upon the shrine there stood a little stone god, a warning to careless drivers, someone to plead and protect. I passed him every morning and if it was not dark, then every evening, too.

Old Gentleman’s house was near the town of Issahaya, a busy small city, very clean as all Japanese cities are, and with many prosperous-looking small town shops. There were more than a few pottery shops, for the famous Arita ware is made near here, but neither town nor shops engaged our attention at that moment. Just ahead was the house, its tiled roofs shining with dew under the morning sun. It was a stately house, surrounded by a wall, and the entrance gate was imposing, two great wooden doors fastened with iron hasps and hinges, and to the right a small wicket gate barely wide enough to admit one person.

The gates were open, for our crew had already arrived, and when we entered we found the western furniture put away and only the beautiful old Japanese things ready for our picture. The master of the house was at home today, a sturdy man in a dark kimono. With him was his wife and they greeted us kindly and warmly. With them were the two daughters, one in her twenties and another in her teens. They too were welcoming and warm.

Nevertheless I wondered if the family knew what it was in for. Our amazingly efficient crew had simply moved in, carpenters and electricians and make-up men and whatnot, and in a moment what had been a peaceful old-fashioned elegant home had become a sort of factory, in spite of the care the men took in doing no damage. Sheets of matting were laid over the fine tatami, and under the clasps that fixed the electric klieg lights to the ceilings the crew put a protection of soft paper. The ceilings of the house were beautiful, a copper-colored wood with a satin-soft finish. But everything was beautiful. Between the rooms and along the verandas fine bamboo curtains bound with satin provided decoration as well as screen. In each room the tokonoma alcove had its special scroll and flower arrangement. The table and utensils for the tea ceremony stood in a special room and panels in the wall opened to reveal a Buddhist shrine shining in gold leaf. The gardens outside were not large but they were well-landscaped and the big flat stones of the walks were arranged with skill and artistry. Our men were busily putting seaweed moss along the edges and in the cracks of the front walk, and they did such a good job that I thought the seaweed was real moss until I was told it was not.

When we were ready, we all sat and waited for our star to arrive, our Old Gentleman, Sessue Hayakawa. He had dined with us the night before and, in western dress had looked like a handsome young man of fifty. We had discussed old age and he told us he practiced yoga and expected to live to be a hundred. Whether yoga has anything to do with it I do not know, but his family do live to be over a hundred — it is a tradition with them, it seems, and they feel cheated if they die before they complete a century. Sessue Hayakawa said his grandmother had died when she was only ninety-nine and her relatives felt she had let the family down. Having gone so far, they thought she should have braced up and finished the century as her forbears had.

Sessue Hayakawa was soon ready to perform, and looked stunningly handsome in the garb of an old-fashioned conservative Japanese gentleman. We examined his make-up, and pointed out to the make-up man a hair out of place in his beard and that the edge of his mustache had come slightly unglued. Sessue’s secretary-maid, or maid-secretary, fanned him all the while, lighted his cigar or cigarette, gave him tea, and generally consoled him. She was young and efficient and took care of him as though he were a nice old baby, which perhaps he was. Whatever he was, he was also a professional actor and a star and it was a joy to see him at work. He gave himself to his part, and gained stature as the day went on. After lunch his aide fetched cushions for him and a pillow and he stripped to his undergarments, all white silk, and lay down and slept in yoga calm while the crew milled about him.

We were without our two boys that day, I remember — Yukio and Toru. They had gone to Nagasaki the day before, had drunk Japanese beer and eaten Chinese food, which is not a good combination. Hence they were ill in the night, and could not appear on the set in the morning, whereupon our star complained that he could not act without them and for a moment the day looked bleak. Then he relented and said that if he had a young girl from the cast to inspire him, he could act. So we lent him our little Transistor girl until the boys arrived, and she sat at the foot of the camera and looked appealing and pretty and he proceeded with relish and gusto.

I remember that entire day as pure joy. The air was light and cool, the sun brilliant. We were all in a state of euphoria, I think, sharing the pleasure of the beautiful surroundings and the smooth grace with which the work went on. Old Gentleman was growing before our eyes. It was like watching a great artist paint a portrait. Yes, I see, as though the scene were here and now before my eyes, the spacious Japanese room, the shoji open to the lovely garden. There before the window Old Gentleman in his white silken robes, scholar and aristocrat, poet and prophet, is sitting upon a cushion before a low table. He is brushing upon a wide sheet of paper the letters of a poem.

The children of God

Are very dear,

Very nice, but very narrow.

Before him kneel the two children. He reads the poem aloud and asks them what it means. They do not know, and he explains slowly and with a grave dignity.

The dialogue is in English and his English is not perfect, but he is able to convey the meaning and the atmosphere of his own soul. The children respond to the illusion of reality. I go smiling all day after that. The evening approaches and I am filled with content and expectation. The high point in the story now has arrived, the hour when Old Gentleman knows that the tidal wave is near. He orders the big bell to be rung and the torches outside the gate to be lit, the final warning to the people to come up the mountain to his house so that they may be saved, they and their children. He fears — he all but knows — that they will not heed, but it may be that a few will come.

It was dark when we assembled for this final scene and I live it again as I write, and let me continue to use the present tense. A great crowd has gathered from the villages and countryside. The day is over and people are free to come and watch what is happening on the hill. A platform has been built across the road at a suitable distance for the camera, and facing gate and house. On either side of the gate great torches are laid ready to be lit. The company manager, a burly fellow with a trumpeting voice, comes out and addresses the crowd, adjuring them to make no noise. It is the big scene, he tells them. There must not be a cough or a cry. The crowd shouts back promises and continues to wait. Endless time passes somehow while last touches are made. The make-up man is frantic, Old Gentleman has to wear a high ancient hat, his beard must be fast so the wind cannot blow away a hair. Even the servant must be made-up with care.

I am given a folding chair under the high platform and there I sit in quiet excitement to wait and watch. The last words are given, the assistant shouts his “get — ready, get — set,” and the director says “Action!”

We begin. I watch with a mighty tightening of the heart. I can scarcely breathe. I remember when I wrote that scene and when it was finished I was exhausted. Now I am to see it in life. Will Old Gentleman be able to play it as I wrote it? Is it possible that he can do it with the power and majesty that were revealed to me?

Behind me and on the patio between the surrounding rice fields the crowd stands silent and absorbed. The crew is busy with lights and camera and suddenly the strong glare falls upon the old servant coming out to light the torches. The leaping flames flare in the darkness to reveal Old Gentleman, that proud old man, standing at the top of the stone steps to the gate. He is gazing out to sea. He is desperate, that old man, a prophet unheeded, yet yearning. He sees all too well what will happen to his people, his ignorant, stubborn and beloved people. Yes, yes — he is the character I created. I see him clear and whole, perfect in conception and detail, and am surprised to feel tears running down my face — I who never weep!

Such realization comes seldom to an artist — a few times perhaps in a lifetime of creation. To me it now comes perfectly for the first time, the happy coincidence of creation made manifest in the flesh and the mind of another human being. I am overcome with the need to share the moment with someone — someone! Hundreds of people are crowding around me, kind people but at this moment strangers. Among them there is no one. I turn and walk through the darkness to the waiting car and am driven away into the night.

In that moment I realized what before I had only known. He was dead. There was to be no further communication. Had communication been possible it would have come by some means out there in darkness when I was alone in the crowd. He would have heard me, he would have known my need. Whatever the barriers, he would have found the way to me somehow, had he been awake and aware, wherever he was. He had always found a way. That he did not could only mean that communication was now impossible or that he was neither awake nor aware.

The hotel room became intolerable again. I slipped unseen through empty corridors and walked the silent streets of the town. All decent folk were in bed, and even a drunken man was staggering his way home. The moon was full — somehow a month had passed — and by its light I left the town and went out into the country. Silence, silence everywhere and only silence, because death is silence. I do not know how long I walked or how far, or even where, except it was beside the sea, so calm that there were no waves, only the long swell of the deep tides. I remember how beautiful the landscape was, by night, the mountains rising above silver mists in the valleys. I saw everything and felt nothing. It was as though I were floating and far away, in a strange country in which I had no life. I might have been dead myself, so profound was the silence within. I would never weep again. I knew now there was no use in tears, nor any comfort to be sought or found. There was only this one — myself. Silly to cry for myself!

I turned inland from the sea then and was walking along a narrow path between rice fields. The air was windless until suddenly a wind rose from nowhere, it seemed, and I stopped to feel the freshness on my face. At that same moment I heard a child cry, a baby, I could tell by the high frantic agony. I looked about me. Yes, a farmhouse across the field was bright with lights. Was the child ill? I have heard so many babies cry that I know their language. No, this was not agony — surprise, perhaps, fear, even anger. It was the cry of a newborn child.

I sank down on the grassy bank, listening. The crying stopped, and I heard voices, and laughter. The child was a boy, then! The child was another life. I lay back on the grass as though upon a bed and for a long time gazed up into the sky. The stars were not visible, for the bright moon was swinging its arc across the heavens and I watched it until I could believe I saw it move. A desperate weariness was creeping into my bones, the weariness of acceptance, the acceptance of the inescapable, the conviction of the unchangeable. From now on I must never again expect to share the great moments of my life. There would be such moments as long as I was alive, moments of beauty, moments of excitement and exhilaration; above all, moments of achievement. In such moments he and I had turned to each other as instinctively as we breathed. That was no more to be. … It is not true that one never walks alone. There is an eternity where one walks alone and we do not know its end.

The night was over and in the east beneath the horizon the sun was shining. It was time to go back to my room, time to prepare for the day’s work.

The good weather held. We drove to Old Gentleman’s house to find our crew ready to begin, even to fresh seaweed in the walks. I had a friend with me today. Years ago I learned to be grateful for small miracles and this one was an old friend from Hiroshima. Our acquaintance began when he and his wife and children came to the United States in connection with some of the young women who, as little girls, had been sadly wounded but not killed by the atomic bomb. While he traveled to give lectures and raise money for hospital expenses during the surgery necessary to restore their marred faces to something like their natural beauty, his wife and three children had spent the summer in my great house. I found him waiting for me that morning and it was cheering to see his friendly face.

“Would you like to go with me for today’s shooting?” I asked.

There is of course something of the actor in every preacher. “What a pleasure,” he said, his good face lighting.

As we drove to Old Gentleman’s house we talked of many things. I learned that Hiroshima is rebuilt and much bigger than before, numbering now some half million souls, each with a body attached. I mention the body, because it was the body that was destroyed by the bomb, and bodies are valuable for it is through them alone, it seems, that souls can communicate.

The day passed at once too swiftly and too long. My Hiroshima friend stayed by me, absorbed in the infinite detail of making a motion picture. We talked now and again.

“Promise me that you will come to Hiroshima before you leave Japan,” he begged.

I could not promise. I knew I would not go. It was not as if I were needed. The people of Hiroshima have lived through the disaster, they have learned that peace is the most valuable goal in human life, for unless there is peace there is death. If I should go to Hiroshima it would be as a sightseer, and I am not that — not in Hiroshima. But I could not explain all that to my friend.

We parted at the end of the day, he to return to his reborn city and I to my room. I was there and I was not there. In absolute rest I spent the evening in a silence which was only a step from sleep. Sometime in the night I was wakened by laughter under my window. I rose and looked out. The moon was shining again and there in the big pool three young men were bathing, their slim nude bodies half hidden in the steaming mists of the earth-heated water, a scene so beautiful with life that I was half convinced, as I watched, that the painter has the best of us all as artist.

It was the last day at Old Gentleman’s house, and I was loath to leave. The farmhouse location had been delightful, and I had made friends with all the family there, even with the cock and his hens and the goat. Only with the barking pig did I maintain a certain distance, feeling a mutual lack of interest, a result, doubtless, of our having nothing in common.

With Old Gentleman’s household I had much in common. I enjoyed to the full their cultivated minds, their delicate courtesy, their friendliness at once frank and restrained. Yet the end must come there, too. Old Gentleman had performed his part with dignity and grace, his servant had led young Yukio, the farm boy, and Toru, the fisherman’s son, into the stately house and had led them to the gate again after Toru had made his fateful choice to leave. The servant had his great moment at that gate, for here it was that he had his momentous dialogue, his yes and his no. He spoke these two words with importance and indeed they are the most important words in any language, containing within their brief sounds the positive and negative forces of the entire universe.

We said our farewells, too, we bowed and gave thanks, and I signed hundreds I am sure, of the big autograph cards that are used for this purpose in Japan. It is almost a pleasure to write one’s name on the ample cream-white surface, so exactly right for a brush or wide soft black lead. Instinctively one writes the name large and in graceful lines. The result is gratifying, somehow, and satisfaction is increased because of the silver edges of the handsome card and the silver stars sprinkled on the back.

Regretfully we gathered ourselves together and left the beautiful place and the kind people who live there and were conveyed by truck and car to our next location, the village of Kitsu. Our vehicles dislodged us on the top of a cliff and from there the approach was on foot and by a narrow path clinging to the rocky hillside. We walked down and down, until we came to the village itself, a cluster of stone cottages separated by narrow cobbled streets. I knew as I walked those streets that already I loved Kitsu the best of all our locations. A glorious bright day it was, the sun burning down upon the sand, and alas, this time the script called for rain. Rain had been forecast over the radio from Nagasaki, but rain there could not be from that brilliant blue sky. Therefore again we must make rain.

And we made rain all day and all night, it seemed, until we pumped the village well dry. The rain making was primitive but effective. A heavy canvas hose connected the well with the tank near the fisherman’s house where the scene was to take place. The tanks were big wooden tubs, each holding fifty gallons of water but I do not know why we did not put the hose into the ocean, for fifty gallons is only a drop in what we needed. Each time that we were ready for the scene someone shouted that the water had given out and the gasoline pump went to work again. Or when we were ready for the scene, actors in position and rain pouring, the make-up man discovered a hair out of place on our star’s forehead, or a rill of sweat on his brow, and by the time that damage was mended, once more we had no more water and so no more rain.

Yet rain we continued to need for now came the scenes when Old Gentleman warned the fisherman’s family that the big wave was sure to come. Grandfather cackled that there would be no typhoon, only rain. The village elders, locally provided extras and very proud of their new career, assembled on the narrow veranda of Toru’s house and agreed with him.

Those elders! I did not imagine that one village could have provided such a collection of snaggle-toothed, cheerful, wisecracking, withered old men, but Kitsu could, evidently, for there they were. At first they were preternaturally grave and well-behaved, especially one eagle-faced old bird of a man, who blinked his hooded eyes occasionally but otherwise gave no sign of life until the director requested some laughter at an appropriate moment. The old bird then staggered us all by shouting, in a stentorian bass voice, a string of words which when translated went thus:

“Put on your hat, American! That’ll make me laugh!” Everyone roared, for this hat had already become a joke. It was a small loosely braided straw, a bright sulphur-yellow, the crown encircled by a vivid variegated band. It was useful merely in locating the whereabouts of the director.

By the time we were really in action after the laughter, and at last synchronizing water with rain, a radio began to blare and again we stopped, the sound man in despair. The blast was from the school on top of the cliff, and the village headman, all devotion, raced up the mountain to make sure the children were clean and well-behaved. We waited and the water gave out, but the children arrived clean, their noses were wiped, and they were wearing clean cotton dresses or pants as the case might be. The headman was proud but stern. Left to themselves, he said, they would surround us and stifle activity. As it was, under his firm but benevolent discipline, however administered, they went about their daily work, obviously eaten up with curiosity about us, but subdued. He with the bowed legs bustled about, a human crab albeit a smiling one.

O Kitsu, darling village! I sat last night in a small empty theater in New York and looked at the finished picture, one friend beside me to share remembrance and to decide whether the picture is what we thought it was when we made it. Others must be the judges finally, for when Kitsu came back to me on the screen, when I saw the sea rolling in on the white beach, the many-colored nets hung there to dry, the boats at rest rising and falling gently on the waves, the noble rocky cliffs of shore and mountain and, yes, perhaps most of all, the fine good faces of the villagers, I felt a surge of spiritual homesickness. There are a few places, a few haunts, so natural to one’s being that they are forever home. I do not know whether I shall ever see Kitsu again in this life, but it is with me and in me.

Let me remember!

From the top of the winding narrow path, as I first saw it, Kitsu is, as I have said, a cluster of roofs on a narrow neck of land cradled between the two arms of the sea, each roof as close to the next as the scales of a fish. From the sea it is different and from the sea I like it best. Each morning we climbed into boats harbored at Obama, we swept along the superb coastline for half an hour and then, rounding a high cliff above the massive rocks, we faced the white beach and the stone walls of Kitsu. Those houses had no windows to the sea. The people when they slept sought shelter from their powerful friend and enemy. The schism was obvious. They lived by the sea and would not live elsewhere, but the sea’s mood was their mood. If the day dawned fair and windless, if the water was as blue as the Mediterranean, then the whole village was alive with laughter and business. If the sky was gray and the wind harsh, the people, unsmiling and anxious, crept along the sea walls to lash their boats firmly to the rocks they had rolled to the beach, and then crept back again into their houses. On a fair day if we entered the wide cove early we might be lucky enough to see the fleets of fishing boats putting out to sea and that was a sight to remember. On a stormy day the open waves broke into angry surf and we went by land. Sitting there in the dark theater in the center of a great American city, I returned to Kitsu. I saw Toru and Yukio in the boat fishing and Setsu — well, I must not tell the story. I see the children’s faces, laughing and carefree, I see those same children grown, their young faces firm with will and purpose, Toru a young man declaring his love under the shelter of the great gray rocks at the end of the curving beach, twisted and hollowed by storm and wind.

Our days fell into the pattern of work. We rose early, breakfasted, and left the hotel at seven. A quarter of a mile away we took ship, and were carried swiftly to the village. Once there each person proceeded to his individual preparation for the day’s scene. For an hour there was no need for me and I walked along the beach, past the stone break-water to the foot of a steep hill. Some steps led up this hill for an eighth of a mile or so, and at the top was a little empty stone temple, once a Shinto shrine. A low wall surrounded it, and the view was sea and mountains and sky.

I found my own niche, however, behind the shrine. At the edge of the high cliff there was a hollow in the rocks which exactly fitted my body. There I went every morning and, held in this hollow as though in his arms, I lay at rest. It was not the rest of sleep. It was the rest of the mind emptied, the spirit freed. He and I had never been here together. In the years when I had lived upon Kyushu I did not know that he existed, nor did he dream of me. Nor was there communication between us now — I cannot pretend that I heard his voice or even was aware of his presence. What did take place gradually as the days passed was a profound insurge of peace. No one became part of me, but I became part of the whole. The warm rock bed in which I lay, the wind rising cool from the sea, the sky intensely blue and the drifting white clouds, the gnarled pine tree bent above my head — of these I was a part, and beyond these, of the whole world. Myself ceased to be, at least for a time, a lonely creature with an aching heart. I was aware of healing pouring into me. It is a fact that at the end of the hour when the conch shell blew, I was able to rise refreshed to join my fellow workers.

The stone steps? I saw them again last night in the dark theater when Old Gentleman came down to warn the villagers, his faithful servant following. Yes, those are the same steps I climbed every morning, thirsting for the peace I found in the shelter of the rock. It became a habit, I woke eager for the hour and savored it deeply and with new zest each day. Then I discovered that something of each day’s peace was left as residue for the night. I did not use it all up, there was an accumulation. I became stronger. I was able to miss a day, then two days, then more. Gradually I was established in myself and I needed no more to climb to that high lonely place and wait to receive. I was able to manufacture peace within myself merely by recalling the sweep of sea and mountain and sky and myself curled into the hollow rock. I had the peace inside me then, and the place became a shrine in my memory. I do not know how this healing came about. I did not pray, if prayer be words or pleading or searching. If the process must be explained, it was simply that I gave myself wholly to a universe which I do not understand but which I know is vast and beautiful beyond my comprehension, my place in it no more than a hollow in a rock. But there is the hollow and it is mine and there is the rock.

This chronicle, if it is to be worth anything, must be truthful. We were approximately one-fourth of the way through the making of the picture and we had arrived at the desert which lies in the middle half of every creative project. The desert begins at that point where progress is too far to consider giving up, and so far from completion that the end is invisible and can be contemplated only by faltering faith. How well I know the bleak prospect! I face it in every book I write. The first quarter of it goes like a breeze from the sea. The work is pure joy. It is sure to be the best book I have ever written. Then I enter upon the middle half of the book and joy departs. The characters refuse to move or speak or laugh or cry. They stand like pillars of salt. Why, oh, why was the book begun? Too much work has been done to cast it aside, yet the end is as far off as the end of a rainbow. There is nothing to do but plod ahead, push the characters this way and that, breathe on them hotly in the hope of restoring life, use every means of artificial respiration. Somewhere, some day, though it is unbelievable for weeks and months or even years, they do begin to breathe. What relief! The desert is past, the last quarter of the book breezes again.

On a morning in the middle of the desert period of the picture I sat on the edge of a fishing boat and watched our star, Sessue Hayakawa. With grim patience he was waiting to be called to the set. The scene had to be repeated because the sound man reported a fly on the microphone which nobody had noticed. There were flies in spite of the repellent which one of the crew sprayed zealously on the just and the unjust alike, and one fly had cunningly concealed himself on the microphone and buzzed enough to outsound everything else. Our star waited and his secretary-maid fanned him under his heavy robes.

“Why doesn’t someone fan me so strategically?” the American director demanded.

No one answered and no one fanned him. Only the star sat patiently on. In his hand he held a tiny transistor radio. He was listening to a fight and when I smiled he explained that only thus could he find life endurable under the circumstances. Meanwhile, the make-up man ran to apply iced towels to his wrists and neck and to touch up his face and the star lit a large cigar to the infinite terror of the make-up man who feared for the beard he had so carefully applied. No one dared to suggest anything to the star, however, and he smoked in peace, his eyes closed as he listened to the fight.

On the set the director struggled with our grandfather, who though actually old, had too young a voice. The director illustrated how an old man’s voice should sound. I held my peace. I know that old men’s voices are high and shrill, not low and husky, but I held my peace. I had learned the first day to hold my peace—“for God’s sake!”

Somehow we struggled through the middle desert, getting up early every morning, crowding exhausted into the boats at night, assuaged only by the beauty of the sunset sky. There were nights when we worked so late that it was dark when we took ship and the sea sparkled with tiny phosphorescent fish, outdoing the stars in the heavens.

And Sessue Hayakawa, advanced to the last day of his contract with us, was finishing his scenes as Old Gentleman and we were still in the desert. Make-up man had done rather a skillful job of aging him the ten years for which the script called, but the same wind which had made the surf too high for the boats one morning blew off his left eyebrow. Makeup man was fit to be tied, because he did not bring an extra eyebrow with him from the hotel. There was nothing to be done except to make an eyebrow from white hairs left over from the beard. … Everything continued to go wrong. The cakes the kindhearted citizens of the town left with us as a treat for the crew turned out to be of an undesirable variety and nobody would eat them. We were all morose. The rushes had been delayed that we hoped to see a week ago. A Japanese holiday had intervened, and a Sunday, and we had seen very few rushes, so that we were at least three days behind schedule. We drew apart and pondered dark thoughts. Could anybody understand the English our actors speak? We were trying the impossible — Japanese actors playing in English! Young Yukio and young Toru, our farm mother, among others, spoke little or no English, and now they spoke it, but was it good enough? How would it sound, even when our star spoke, to an American audience?

In the midst of the desert of pessimism we had a letter from our business manager in Tokyo. She had seen the rushes of Old Gentleman and they were superb, she said, including dialogue. They made her cry, she reported. For that young sophisticate to cry means something. We had not supposed it possible, so cool and collected was she, so chary of praise. Our hopes soared. Perhaps we were almost out of the desert.

In renewed spirits we gave a dinner for Sessue Hayakawa in honor of his leaving us. He was in a fine mood and drank a mixture of cold beer and sake, which he sustained admirably, and his stories were as good as his plays. Fifty years in theater in many countries made a lifetime of stories worth telling. We were sorry to see him go, and I think he was sorry to leave us, but there is nothing permanent in theater life. We work together closely for a few days and weeks and months, growing fond of one another, we part and forget. Nothing goes deep — it is the only way to bear it.

The rushes arrived and we went to the theater across the street after the evening show was over. They did not make me cry but I was pleased with them. Then suddenly I saw our young star, our grown-up Toru. He was sitting in the row ahead of me, heavily asleep. My heart sank under the seat. Could he sleep? Yes, he could and did. I turned to my companion.

“Look at that!”

“He is drunk,” was the indignant reply.

Yes, there was a party tonight and our young star was drunk. It was all too obvious when the rushes ended and we left the theater. He could not stand up. Nevertheless, I felt chilled. Drunk or sober, how could he sleep? No, we were still in the desert and we could only plod on.

There was one more moment in the day. It was the last glimpse, the final close-up, of Old Gentleman’s servant. We took it in front of the hotel, and the crowd gathered, a prosperous holiday crowd with cameras and gaiety. Old Gentleman’s servant was of course the little ancient wardrobe man but he had gained a new dignity. He had achieved a lifelong dream. He was now an actor. All these years he had only been making clothes and finding costumes for others to wear upon the stage. But now he had worn a costume of his own, he had had his face made up — only a little, for it was such a perfect face for the part. That night he stood in the presence of the crowd with calm and dignity and the cameraman took the close-ups we needed for the final film. When they were finished, we bowed and shook hands, we thanked him and he bowed in return. He told us that this was the greatest year of his life. He had become an actor, he had played a part with Sessue Hayakawa, and next month he was to marry off his daughter.

So the day ended.

“Otsukaresama!”

It is a word meaning, “You are tired,” a gentle Japanese way of saying, “You may quit for the day.”

It was true. We were tired.

We were now well past the desert. There was one big scene left for Kitsu, the coming of the tidal wave. While we had been working around this scene, our special-effects man had been creating it in the special-effects studio in Tokyo. Twice he had come to Obama to consult and to take hundreds of pictures of Kitsu and the empty beach beyond. We knew that we were in safe hands, the tidal wave would be perfect, but we could not see it until we returned to the city. Ours was the task of creating the approach to the wave, and the recovery from it.

An air of tensity and dread crept into the village as we prepared for the scene of the tidal wave. This was cutting near the bone. Every man, woman and child feared above all else in their beautiful precarious life the ungovernable tidal wave striking with no warning except the low and ominous roar over the horizon, the muddied water of the well, the quiver of the earth. Even to imagine the horror was almost more than they could bear as they set themselves doggedly to the task of acting the dread reality. Farm and fisher families played their parts well, and we drew near to the final evening, when in the darkness the torches flamed before Old Gentleman’s house and the panic-stricken Kitsu families fled from their ancestral homes up the narrow winding mountain path to safety at the top of the cliff.

Toru was for that evening the star, the boy Toru. Our part of the scene was to bring him to the moment when he sees the village swept away, and we see it in his face. The tidal wave was to be inserted here and after it we took over again when Toru, in agony and madness and all but swept away himself, was saved only by a strong kind hand put out to seize him as he clung to the cliff. He acted the part superbly but I remember especially the people swarming up the hillside, the dogged frightened people taking the path their ancestors had trodden so often before them, but in reality.

That night when it was all over and we went away soberly, we gained a new understanding of the incomparable courage of the Kitsu folk, the unswerving devotion to the sea and to their way of life, a clean good way, but perilous. We said good-by with tender regret. I have memories of a crowd of kind faces in the lantern light, of the headman proudly receiving our praise and thanks, saying the only reward he wished was to know when the picture would be shown in Japan.

“We will put on our best clothes and go even to Tokyo,” he told us.

At last on the mountain the flames of the torches at Old Gentleman’s gate died into final darkness. It was over, the picture was made, and never shall I forget the long beautiful days of sea, wind and sunshine, of meals shared on the beach, and the great pewter pots of tea, nor shall I ever forget the hours of rest I spent lying half asleep in an empty boat drawn up on the shore, the drowsy sound of waves in my ears, the heat of noon upon me. I had put away in those days and for the time being the waiting shadows of loss and loneliness. I lived for the day, the hour, the work, the deep organic healing of the warmth of the sun, the driving rain, and the stormy sea.

We were so near the end of the picture now that we could plot the design of our days. After Kitsu came the empty beach of Chijiwa and here was the great shark-catching scene and the last scene with the children now grown and finding love and life, joy and sorrow. Last of all at Kitsu was the scene with Old Gentleman, Toru and Setsu. After that there remained only the volcano scene at Oshima to be shot and inserted at its proper place in the film.

I am going too fast. Let me remember first Chijiwa itself. In a crowded country, on a matchless shore, this wide and beautiful beach is left unpopulated. It is empty and has been for centuries. Go there any day and you will see fishing nets spread out to dry but no people. Chijiwa faces the sea at a peculiar angle so that typhoons and tidal waves strike it with a devastating force, and the fisherfolk, after the often repeated experience of total destruction, have listened at last to the threatening sea and live there no more.

It is a supremely fine beach, nevertheless, stretching two miles long and reaching deep into the land, its boundaries, east and west, huge and handsome rocks. My life in Asia and my love of Asian art has conditioned me to rocks. They add stability to the landscape, and the shapes they take from age and weather express the moods of nature. They signify strength and resistance and eternal values. At the far end of Chijiwa there were such rocks, and against them as backdrop we played the final love scene with Toru and Setsu, grown-up. It was toward the rocks Old Gentleman went when he bade them his last farewell.

Let me not forget, either, the sharks. It is a unique scene in the picture and it was a unique experience to perform. Once a year the fisherfolk of that region go out to hunt sharks. These cruel creatures of the sea destroy the fish in any area they choose to possess and fishermen make war against them. Their coming is heralded by shoals of small fish, the bait fish, and when these appear, the fishermen prepare their strategy. They bring their boats, some two hundred, and stretch between them the biggest net in the world and the strongest. Then the boats widen into a vast circle and as the bait fish swim into its space, the sharks follow. When the net is full of the squirming monsters the boats draw together and the sharks are in a trap. On the shore hundreds of men haul in the net, and drag the sharks to the beach. There they club the sharks to death, then cart them away, their tender parts to be eaten, the rest to be made into oil and fertilizer. Sometimes the take is good, sometimes it is not. Last year the men caught only one shark, but this year we brought them luck, they said, for they caught and killed one hundred and twenty.

I have no affection for sharks but I did not enjoy the clubbing. I did enjoy very much the fleet of fishing boats, their gay flags flying in the bright sunshine, and the lively crowd on the shore. The crowd was always with us, and long ago we had learned to accept them as part of the landscape. Why should I describe the scene further, when it is all there in the picture and better than I can tell it in words? It is an ancestral war, this, between man and shark, and on that day man won. And while the battle was being fought again, our characters carried on their own personal strife, the grown Haruko and Setsu in their memorable fight, when Haruko sought to drown Setsu, and Toru and Yukio, no longer children, faced the private dangers of being men. It is all there in the picture, even to the end when Toru sets out for sea in his boat and with his love.

We had now only to return to Oshima, yet I had one dream to fulfill. It was a small dream, of no importance to anyone except myself, and it was to go to the little Japanese house on the mountainside near Unzen where once in a previous life, I had taken refuge during the Second Revolution in China. The attacking army proved to be Communist-led, and all Westerners had been compelled to leave the city of Nanking where we were living. To Japan I had come with my family and a few other Americans and to the mountains above Nagasaki. Thither I returned now, with a Japanese friend as guide and interpreter.

We rented a car and driver and at the usual breackneck speed we wound our way along the abruptly curving road to Unzen. The mountain village I remembered had grown into a modern spa, but the hot springs were the same, spouting jets of steam from hundreds of small vents in the rocks, and people were boiling eggs and heating water for tea over the natural fires. I could not find my way through the new streets to the old country road I remembered, and we stopped a young woman to inquire if she had ever heard of houses where once, years ago, American refugees from China had lived. Her face lighted — yes, her grandfather knew and he had often spoken of those Americans. She produced the grandfather, a thin sprightly old man, who cheerfully led us to the road and down into a shallow valley, across a brook and up the mountain again until at last we came to the cluster of Japanese houses. They were empty now and closed, but I saw the little place of shelter where we had lived safely for a while and among friends but in great poverty, stripped by the revolution of all we had owned. My life had changed completely in the intervening years. I was no longer the rather desperate young woman who had lived under that roof and the overhanging pines. I pressed some money on the old man and went away, knowing I would never return. As we left Unzen, however, someone called us and we stopped the car. It was the young woman and she handed me a package.

“My grandfather says he remembers that you used to buy these rice cakes for your children,” she said.

It was true. I had forgotten, but he had not.

Oshima had looked hellish enough on our scouring trip in May but now it was October and the volcano had been active and rebellious in the months between. Even in Tokyo the weather was ominous. We had planned to go by air and had chartered a plane that was to take us all across the channel in relays but the morning dawned somber and gray and the pilot refused to fly. We were working against time now, each of us anxious to get home or to overdue jobs, and to avoid delay we took passage on the night boat. A typhoon was in the offing and even a ship had its hazards. We had taken so many risks, however, had committed ourselves to sea and air so often, that one more risk seemed plausible.

In driving rain and howling wind we drove to the quay that night and boarded a top-heavy, old-fashioned steamer. Fortunate the darkness, for we could not see how many people were embarking. We got ourselves on board, camera, crew, actors and all, and went at once to our cabins. In a few minutes we were under way and heading for the sea.

I shudder as I remember that fearful night. The sea was vicious, the wind and rain contending enemies, but worst of all the ship was carrying four times its proper load of passengers and again these passengers were hundreds of school children, off on an excursion to Oshima. They were seasick by the hundreds, poor little things, and the lavatories and corridors became unusable and impassable. The real danger, however, was in the ship itself. The superstructure was far too high and the vessel rolled from side to side to a degree that imperiled our lives. I am a seasoned sailor and have crossed oceans again and again from my first voyage across the Pacific at the age of three months to my last flight across the same ocean a few months ago at an age grown indefinite, yet never have I been in fear as I was that whole night long on the way to Oshima. Somewhere, before dawn, a friend who was traveling with us came in to see how his wife, my cabin mate, was faring. His good face was green with terror.

“We’re breaking all the laws of mathematics,” he groaned. “The ship is rolling at an impossible mathematical degree. It can’t be done. We should by rights be flat on our side and floundering.”

I lay on my berth and reflected upon a strange life — my own. How is it that a mild-mannered peaceable woman with no desire, ambition or even inclination for adventure manages somehow to be always in the midst of adventure? So passionately do I love the usual, the commonplace, the everyday, that I turn off the television instantly if an adventure program comes on. It is no use. I am constantly involved in some daring expedition and loathing it, and I have always particularly hated the thought of drowning at sea. I dislike drowning in any case, but if it must be my end I prefer a small swimming pool or better still, a bathtub. Yet I cannot count the seas I have traveled upon, how many times the Pacific, scarcely less often the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and all the seas curling in and around the complex shores of Asia. Now apparently I was to meet my fate between Tokyo and Oshima. The Big Wave, indeed!

Dawn came at last, a weak wet dawn, the pale sun fringed with mists, and the ocean still growling and snarling its white-crested waves in contradictory currents. The dim outlines of Oshima appeared from nowhere and we struggled into our clothes. In fifteen minutes we were due to dock. Fifteen minutes became an hour and then two hours while we continued to roll. We could not dock, it appeared, because the sea was too rough. If it did not subside, we were told, we would be compelled to go to the other side of the island where there was an inferior dock. It did not subside and we went to the other side of the island to the inferior dock. A long procession of pale but determined school children disembarked and then we got off and went through rain to the hotel. This time I was too subdued to protest when I found myself again quartered in the Emperor’s room, a setting I had refused on my earlier visit as being too overwhelming for the modest citizen of a republic.

We had a quick breakfast and set out by car to the foot of the volcano. There horses waited for those who wanted to ride. I chose to walk, for it had been some years since I had been on horseback. Moreover experience had taught me to distrust the Asian horse, mule or pony. They lead a hard life, for the Asian is not sentimental about animals, as we Americans are. The philosophy of the transmigration of souls leads the Asian to believe that the human being who has been criminal in life will in his next phase be an animal not to be trusted to behave better than the criminal who inhabits him. While I cannot say that I believe this, yet if I were to judge by the behavior of horses I have known in Asia, I might at least consider it possible that they are indeed animated by some evil force. “Put not your trust in horses,” the good book tells us. On foot, therefore, I climbed the black volcano, ascending a dark and barren landscape spectacularly, horrifyingly beautiful.

Under a stormy gray sky the effect was even more somber and strange. Streamers of white steam flew from every crack and cranny of the volcano and the surrounding high mountains. These I had not seen on my previous visit, and were to be explained by the typhoon, I found upon inquiry. The crater of the volcano is very large, and had in the last few days become larger, for under the torrential rains the walls had crumbled at various places. Wherever there was a surface it had been dampened and choked and the steam thus held back had forced its way through channels in the mountains. Hence the ribbons and banners of steam, all blown by the wind in one direction. Again and again I stopped on my way to look at the spectacle, for spectacle it was. I have seen some of the most magnificent scenery in the world, but for splendor and terror, I put first the volcano on Oshima island, that day.

Two days we spent there, reckless, wonderful, unforgettable days. Only a short time before we came the volcano had erupted, throwing great rocks into the air and gnawing at the mountain. Guards stood everywhere now to forbid us passage, but we pushed our way to the very edge of the crater in spite of them, the camera perched precariously anywhere it could stand or be held. The drop into the crater was at two levels, the one an encircling terrace, the other without bottom and hidden in clouds of vile-smelling gas and steam. Camera and crew and director descended to the terrace, but I stayed at the edge above, not only because I am prudent, but because the distracted guards warned us that we must all run for our lives if we heard the slightest roar or rumbling from inside the crater. I did not wish to imperil the young men, in such case, who might feel in honor compelled to run at my slower pace.

The wind blew bitterly cold and work went on without the usual laughter and good cheer. Swiftly and with concentration each did his part. I confess my heart lost too many beats as I watched the crew walking about inside the crater, leaping across great cracks, sinking into soft ashy soil, standing at the very edge of the abyss. I recalled it all again when the rushes were shown in the theater in New York. I saw the boy Yukio standing there on the screen, his eyes wide with fear, the white steam curling upward from the crater and enclosing him. No wonder he cries out to his father,

“We are unlucky, we people of Japan!”

“Why do you say that?” his father asks.

“Sea and the mountain,” the boy says, “they work to destroy us.”

We were glad when the two days were ended, the work finished, and yet we would not have missed the experience. I shall never forget the landscape, black as the other side of the moon. And we flew across the water on the third day under a clear sky and arrived at Tokyo airfield in exactly forty-five minutes, safely.

Five days later the volcano went into eruption and the lava-black soil upon which we had stood fell into the abyss.

So the picture was made. It was finished except for the scene of the tidal wave, which was being built in the special-effects studio in Tokyo. Thither I went on my last day. The famous special-effects artist was waiting for me, debonair in a new light suit and hat and with a cane. He had the confident air of one who knows that he has done a triumphantly good job, and after a survey of the scene I agreed with him. In a space as vast as Madison Square Garden in New York, which is the biggest place I can think of at the moment, he had reconstructed Kitsu, the mountains and the sea. The houses were three feet high, each in perfect miniature, and everything else was in proportion. A river ran outside the studio and the rushing water for the tidal wave would be released into the studio by great sluices along one side. I looked into the houses, I climbed the little mountain, I marveled at the exactitude of the beach, even to the rocks where in reality I had so often taken shelter. The set was not yet ready for the tidal wave. That I was to see later on the screen in all its power and terror. I had seen everything else, however, and I said farewell, gave thanks, and went away.

My hotel room had become a sort of home, and I felt loath to leave it, yet I knew that my life in it was over. It had been a pleasant place and I had lived there in deepening peace. Now the old dread of facing another life without him and of returning alone to the places where we had always been together was with me again. It had to be done, however. I could not escape, and there could be no further postponement.

“Come back, come back soon to Japan,” my dear friends said, and I promised that I would and, tearing myself away, I went alone into the jet plane that was to carry me back again to New York.

I say New York, although of course New York is only on the way to my farmhouse home in Pennsylvania. But I have a stopping place in New York, that city of wonders and grief. He and I always kept a place there. He needed it for his work and for his spirit, and I have continued our tradition. It is not the same place we shared for so many years. Within the confines of our old apartment I could not escape the torture of memory. Whether I would have stayed I do not know, but the skyscrapers of steel and glass had pushed their way up our avenue, and the building in which we had made a city home was to be torn down. I found a place farther uptown in a new building, where there were no memories except the ones I carry hidden wherever I am.

And here I tell a story that has nothing to do with the picture, except that it provides a closing scene for myself. When I was looking for the new apartment a daughter helped me by sorting out the impossibles and bringing me at last to see the two or three possibles. It was night, I remember, when I looked at these places. I was in haste and it did not seem to matter much where I lived. We entered bare un-painted rooms. I saw a wide window and through the darkness I discerned dimly a building whose roof faced my window, a school, my daughter said, and fortunate for me, for there would be no high building to cut off the view. I did not care very much about that, either, for when do I have time in New York to look at a view? Besides, I have plenty of view in my Pennsylvania home. So I decided upon impulse.

“I’ll take it.”

The choice was haphazard, I would have said, a chancy thing. But I am beginning to believe that there is no such thing as pure chance in this world. For here is the preliminary to this closing story:

When I was a child and often reluctant to do my duty, my father used to say to me firmly but gently,

“If you will not do it because it is right, then do it for the greater glory of God.”

For the greater glory of God then, and for my father’s sake, though still reluctant, I did do what had to be done, at least as often as possible.

Now to return to the apartment. I did not once see it while it was being decorated. When all was finished I opened the door and went straight to the big window. It was a bright day, I remember, one of New York’s best, the air fresh from the sea and the sky blue. And facing me, across the building, under the eaves and along the roof, I saw these words carved in huge stone letters:

AD MAIOREM DEI GLORIAM

They face me now as I write. To the greater glory of God! What does it mean, this voice from the grave, my father’s grave? He lies buried on a mountaintop in the very heart of a China lost to me. I am here and alive and thousands of miles away. Are we in communication, he and I, through my father? It is not possible.

How dare I say it is not?

Some day we shall know. What day? That day, perhaps, when saints and scientists unite to make a total search for truth. It is the saints, the believers, who should have the courage to urge the scientists to help them discover whether the spirit continues its life of energy when the mass we call body ceases to be the container. Faith supplies the hypothesis, but only science can provide the computor for verification. The unbeliever will never pursue the search. He is already static, a pillar of salt, forever looking backward.

There are no miracles, of that I am sure. If one walks on water and heals the sick and raises the dead to life again, it is not a matter of magic but a matter of knowing how to do it. There is no supernatural; there is only the supremely natural, the purely scientific. Science and religion, religion and science, put it as I may, they are two sides of the same glass, through which we see darkly until these two, focusing together, reveal the truth.

On the day when the message comes through from over the far horizon where dwells “that great majority,” the dead, the proof will reach us, not as a host of angels in the sky but as a wave length recorded in a laboratory, a wave length as indisputable and personal as the fingerprint belonging to someone whose body is dust. Then the scientist, recognizing the wave length, will exclaim, “But that’s someone I know! I took his wave length before he died.” And he will compare his record with the wave length just recorded and will know that at last a device, a machine, is able to receive a message dreamed of for centuries, the message of the continuing individual existence, which we call the immortality of the soul.

Or perhaps it will not be a scientist who receives, but a woman, waiting at a window open to the sky.