there a book about it?”
The man looked at him a moment, as if deciding something. Finally, in a weary voice, he said: “That’s Mishima.”
It was luck, it was fate, it was magic. Hiro stood bewildered before the rack the shop owner pointed him to—twenty, twenty-five, thirty Mishima titles in duplicate and triplicate and more taking a good slice out of the wall. It was as if his hand was guided: the first book he chose, the very first, was The Way of the Samurai. He slipped it off the shelf, pleased by its glossy cover and the drawing of dueling swordsmen that seemed to dance across it. He never even glanced inside: the cover was enough. That and the poster. He laid down his money for the laconic shopkeeper and ducked out the door with his treasure, one eye on the cruel photo of the martyred author.
Like most Japanese boys, Hiro knew the mythos of the samurai as thoroughly as his American counterpart knew that of the gun-slinger, the dance-hall girl and the cattle rustler. The wandering samurai, like the lone man on the horse, was a mainstay of network TV, the movie theater, cheap adventure novels and lurid comics, not to mention classics like The Forty-Seven Ronin that were on every school reading list. But after a period when he was eight or nine and ran around all day with a wooden sword and a hachimaki looped round his head, he’d outgrown his fascination with the whole business of topknots and swords: samurai, he could take them or leave them. Still, when he opened Mishima’s book, it brought him back. He didn’t know then of Mishima’s right-wing politics, of his homosexuality and grandstanding, or even of his ritual suicide—all he knew was that he’d entered another world.
The book puzzled him at first. It wasn’t a story. There were no swordfights, no hair-raising tales of samurai derring-do and acts of redemptive heroism. No. It was a study, a commentary actually, by this man, this Mishima with the arrows in his groin, on Jocho Yamamoto’s ancient samurai code of ethics, Hagakure. Hiro didn’t know what to make of it. I discovered that the Way of the Samurai is death, he read. And: Human beings in this life are like marionettes … free will is an illusion. He read that it was acceptable for a samurai to apply rouge if he woke up with a hangover and that wetting the earlobes with spittle would control nervousness in any situation. It all felt faintly ridiculous.
But he stuck with it, though it was like a textbook, a manual, like something he might read in a science or navigation class. He kept seeing the picture of the martyred author—only later did he realize it was a pose, Mishima’s masochistic homage to an Italian painting of a martyred saint—and he plowed through the book as if it were written in code, as if it were his personal initiation into the arcane rites and ancient secrets that would make their master the equal of anyone. It was a game, a puzzle, a conundrum. Hagakure— Hidden Among the Leaves—even its title was mysterious. In the following weeks he went back to the shop several times—the poster was gone, replaced by a life-size cutout of an old man with the face of a bird and a shock of white hair—to sample Mishima’s other books. They were novels, for the most part, and he enjoyed them, but none of them had the tug of the first. There was something there, and he didn’t know what it was. Over and over he read the cryptic passages, over and over. And then one day, in the way that the sun suddenly breaks through the clouds in the midst of a storm, he had it.
They’d ganged up on him at the ballfield—six or seven of them—and they’d slapped him around and flung his Yomiuri Giants cap into the sewer. He was in a rage, but the rage gave way to despair. When would it end, he asked himself, and the answer was never. He barely spoke to his grandparents that night, and he was restless: he didn’t want to watch the game shows, didn’t want to listen to tapes on his Walkman, he didn’t want to study or read. Finally, out of boredom, he picked up his dog-eared copy of Hagakure, opened it at random and began to read. The passage was about modern society, about how corrupt and weak it had become, and all at once, as if a switch had been flipped inside his head, Mishima’s words made perfect sense. All at once he understood: the book was about glory, and nothing less.
The society around him—the society into which he’d tried to fit himself all the years of his life—was corrupt, emasculated, obsessed with material things, with the pettiness of getting and taking, selling and buying—and where was the glory in that? Where was the glory in being a nation of salarymen in white shirts and western suits making VCRs for the rest of the world like a tribe of trained monkeys? Hiro saw it, saw it clearly: Fujima, Morita, Kawakami and all the rest of them, they were nothing, eunuchs, wimps, gutless and shameless, and they would grow up to chase after yen and dollars like all the other fools who made fun of him, who singled him out as the pariah. But he wasn’t the pariah, they were. To live by the code of Hagakure made him more Japanese than they, made him purer, better. It was the ultimate code of fea pure—or no, it went beyond fea pure and into another realm altogether, a realm of power and confidence—of purity—that transcended the material, the flesh, death itself. He’d been made to feel inferior all his life, and here was a way to conquer it—not only on the ballfield, but on the streets and in the restaurants and theaters and anywhere else he chose to go. He would fight back at Fujima and the rest of them with the oldest weapon in the Japanese arsenal. He would become a modern samurai.
But now, as he lay on the Amerikajiris cramped little couch, using Jocho as his pillow, all that seemed an eternity away. To rely on Jocho had become automatic with him, but now he was in America, where everyone was a gaijin and no one cared, and he would have to find a new code, a new way to live. His tormentors were back in Yokohama and in Tokyo, they were sailing for New York aboard the Tokachi-maru, and he was free—or he would be, if only he could get to Beantown or the City of Brotherly Love. The thought soothed him—he envisioned a city like Tokyo, with skyscrapers and elevated trains and a raucous snarl of traffic, but every face was different—they were white and black and yellow and everything in between—and they all glowed with the rapture of brotherly love. He held that image as he might have sucked a piece of candy. And then he shut his eyes and let the night fall in on him.
* * * He woke to a parliament of birds and the trembling watery light of dawn. This time there was no confusion: the moment his eyes snapped open he knew who he was and where and why. He sat up with a long grudging adhesive groan of his Band-Aid plastic strips and examined his shorts and T-shirt and the ventilated tennis shoes that seemed to leer at him from the floor. He could see at a glance that the shoes were at least two sizes too big, designed as they were for the flapping gargantuan feet of hakujin giants. And the shorts! They fit, sure, but they were atrocious, ridiculous, a moronic blaze of color that made him doubt the manufacturer’s sanity. What did she think he was—a clown or something? Was she trying to make fun of him? His gaze fell on the little table with its clutter of Sweet’n Low packets and the coffee jar he’d scraped clean in his greed, and he felt ashamed of himself. Deeply ashamed. She’d sacrificed her lunch for him, given him a couch to sleep on, gone out and found him clothes and shoes and Band-Aid plastic strips, and here he was complaining. He was an ingrate. A criminal. His face burned with shame.
Already he owed her a debt—an on—that he could never begin to repay, not even if he were back in Japan and working in a factory and he saved every yen he made for the next six years. The thought humiliated him, made him feel even lower than he had the night before when he’d come to her in rags. In Japan, any favor, any gratuitous kindness, however small or altruistic, saddles its receiver with a debt of honor that can only be redeemed by repaying the favor many times over. It has become so ritualized, so onerous, in fact, that no matter what their extremity, people are terrified of being helped. You could be run down in the street and insist on crawling to the hospital rather than have a stranger lend a hand—and the stranger would no doubt run the other way, out of respect for your pain and the impossible burden he’d be laying on your shoulders were he to help.
Hiro had been inculcated with the subtleties and minute gradations of this system all his life, his grandmother the most rigorous on appraiser in all Japan—she could instantly translate any gift or favor into the precise material worth of its return, and she had nothing but contempt for anyone who fell short by even a yen. Help an old woman across the street and you got a hand-knitted sweater, a box of cherry chocolates and an invitation to tea. Accept the invitation and you owed the old woman a two-week vacation in Saipan, where she would sift for the bone fragments of her unburied sons; refuse it, and commit a crime second only to mass murder. The whole society was one vast web of obligation. Fail, break a strand of the web, and you’ve lost face, 120 million tongues clucking tsk-tsk-tsk.
Suddenly, he wanted to hide himself. She’d be coming any minute now, bobbing up the path on her long white legs. What would he say to her? And what if she wanted a cup of coffee? What then? Mortified, his ears
