Janwillem De Wetering - The Japanese Corpse

"I'd like to go," the commissaris said to Dorin. Dorin bowed. He was looking at the daimyo. His eyes glittered and his hand on the machine pistol's grip twitched.

"Don't bother to bring your arms," the daimyo said, and waved at the cutter, which turned and began to sail toward the two tied-up boats. "We are honorable people. You will be our guests until the moment we return you to your inn. If you disagree with our suggestions you will still be our guests. The yakusa believe in friendship." He put his hand on Yuiko's forearm. "Jin-gi."

"Jin-gi," Yuiko said. "The daimyo wants you to hear the word in Japanese. It means more than friendship."

The daimyo's thick index finger was tracing the characters in the air. "Jin-gi," he said again. "Dorin-san will be able to explain it to you. A most important word. You have shown us that you know the idea behind the word."

He bowed to de Gier. "You saved the life of a yakusa girl."

He turned heavily and bowed to the commissaris. "If you hadn't dressed Kono's wound he might have lost his hand. Our doctor said so. Kono isn't a healthy man; microbes can catch him easily."

The cutter came alongside and the daimyo got up and grabbed the rope on the sailboat's foredeck. The young man who had been pushed overboard by de Gier came aboard the fishing boat.

"Perhaps we should all return in our own boats," the daimyo suggested.

There were bows and smiles. Dorin smiled too, but his eyes still glittered.

"Aha," the Commissaris said, and readjusted the sash of his striped kimono. "That was an excellent meal, sergeant, and it was an excellent day too." He grinned delightedly and got up. They had been eating in their room and the two maids had just cleared the table. They had left a full coffeepot and two cups and cleaned the ashtray. The room was spotless as usual, and the soft colors of the tatamis blended with the evening light coming in through the open balcony doors.

"I am glad you feel well, sir. I thought the day on the water would have affected your legs." The sergeant was lying flat on his back, his head resting on his clasped hands. He had found the commissaris in the bathroom when he came back, after having dropped Yuiko off at her apartment. She had asked him in but he had excused himself, promising to phone the next day to make arrangements for picking her up for the daimyo's party. He had been sure that the commissaris would be in pain, but the old man had been singing in the wooden bathtub, only pausing long enough to ask de Gier to light a cigar for him.

"No. I feel fine," the commissaris said. He had opened the door of the cupboard and rolled out his matress. "These hard little pillows are really very comfortable once you get used to them." He knocked the pillow into shape and lay down. "You pour the coffee, sergeant, I am not going to do anything anymore. How did you like me waving that machine pistol? Did I look dangerous?"

De Gier grinned. "You looked deadly, sir."

"Yes," the commissaris said, sitting up to accept the cup. "I always wanted to say, 'I'll pump you full of lead.' It's such an idiotic statement to make. Why don't you ask Dorin to come over, maybe we can cheer him up. He didn't say a word on the way back; not that I minded, I think I was asleep most of the time."

It took de Gier a little while to locate Dorin. He wasn't in his room and the sergeant had to go down to the inn's office. One of the maids said that he might have gone to a little bar close by, and offered to go and fetch him. De Gier said he would go himself but the maids covered their mouths and tittered. He shouldn't go into the street in his kimono. The sergeant didn't understand. Surely a kimono is the right thing to wear in Japan. But it wasn't. The innkeeper was summoned from his private quarters to explain. The kimono de Gier was wearing was a bath kimono, not to be worn outdoors. He protested that he had seen Japanese gentlemen in the train, dressed only in their underwear, and in the middle of the day. Yes, but that was different. He gave up and went back to his room. The maid ran off to fetch Dorin.

Dorin came in exhaling a strong sweet smell of alcohol. His eyes were bloodshot. He was smiling but the smile only touched his face. The commissaris fetched a cushion from the cupboard and placed it near the toko-noma in which the maids had placed fresh flowers, two wild roses, bending down gracefully from lone stems.

"I am sorry," the commissaris said. "I didn't want to disturb you, but the sergeant and I thought that you might like to have coffee with us. You haven't had your bath yet?"

Dorin was still wearing the clothes he had worn on the launch, a Windbreaker and a pair of jeans, and his hair stood up.

"Well," the commissaris said when Dorin had been given his coffee by the sergeant. "How do you feel about our quest now? Do you think we have made some headway?"

Dorin nodded once and raised the cup to his lips.

"You don't?" the commissaris asked, and looked at the scroll which formed the background of the two wild roses in the tokonoma. The scroll showed a single character, drawn with a thick brush. The innkeeper had told him that the character stood for "dreams" and had been given to his father by the former abbot of Daidharmaji. It had been drawn by the abbot just before he died. He had made a number of scrolls, all with the same character, and had given them to the people he had known well, explaining that the word summed up his total experience of the life he was about to finish.

"Dreams," the commissaris muttered.

"Pardon?" Dorin asked.

The commissaris pointed at the scroll. Dorin turned to look at the character. "Yes," he said. "Dreams. Nightmares. I had one today. I saw the face of a pig." He turned back and stared at his hands which were lying motionless on his thighs. "Pig!" he said again, spitting out the word.

"Whom did you see?" de Gier asked. "You are not referring to the daimyo, are you?"

"I am," Dorin said, spilling coffee on his jeans and absentmindedly wiping the drops. "We know what the animal looks like now. Daimyo! You know what the word means?"

"Lord," the commissaris said.

"Right. Lord. In the old days the daimyos ruled parts of the country in the name of the emperor. They were dukes and counts and marquises, hand-picked for their valor and intelligence and insight. They weren't brothel-keepers and dealers in drugs and restaurant owners and buyers of stolen goods. Our little pig is nothing but a businessman gone wrong. A businessman is a merchant and merchants have never counted for much in our country. They are greedy small-minded individuals, hardly human, concerned with profit only. Their duty is the distribution of goods, but they are too stupid to know that they have a duty. If the daimyos needed the services of a merchant they would stroll into his store and take what they wanted and they wouldn't bother about asking a price. The merchant could collect his bill afterward, at the back-entrance of the palace, if he could find a clerk who had a few minutes available. The merchant would grovel in the dust at the side of the street as the daimyo rode past. And if the merchant turned out to be a crook he would be clubbed to death, quickly and in a quiet place so that he wouldn't disturb anyone with his screams."

"Really?" the commissaris asked. Dorin's furious face, each facial muscle working, the gleaming teeth and the wildly gesticulating hands had reminded him of a prewar cartoon, showing a Japanese soldier and warning against the Yellow Peril that was about to attack the world. The soldier had been grinning evilly and had pointed his bayonetted rifle.

"So now we know what our perverted grocer looks like," Dorin said, jumping up suddenly and nearly upsetting the low table so that de Gier had to reach out to steady it. "Our mighty fellow who can speak into a microphone and summon an airplane from the sky and a boat full of bad men from the waves of Lake Biwa. I could have blasted that plane right into the clouds and exploded his nutshell. I also had a radio in the launch."