Shan Sa: The Girl Who Played Go

After our training we no longer had to hide our recreational activities. High-ranking officers openly kept geishas, and second lieutenants made do with more fleeting encounters.

I met Miss Sunlight in June 1931. We were in a teahouse celebrating our captain’s promotion, and the screens slid silently backwards and forwards, revealing a steady stream of geishas. As one group arrived, the previous group was swallowed up in the shadows. Night had fallen along the Sumida, and boats with lanterns glided slowly downstream. I had been drinking and my head was spinning. We were getting one of the officers drunk as he lost his hand at cards, and I kept roaring with laughter. I was just about to run outside to be sick when I caught sight of an apprentice geisha [10]in a blue kimono with wide, flowing sleeves with an iris design on them. She bowed deeply in greeting, moving slowly and with great nobility. Despite the white powder on her cheeks, the beauty mark that stood out against her chin made her look somehow melancholy.

She took a samisen from its case, picked up her ivory plectrum and tuned the instrument. She struck the strings abruptly and they reverberated loudly; it was like a clap of thunder in a summer sky. The wind blew, bending the trees and tearing open the inky clouds. The quiet clipping of the plectrum produced flashes of lightning that hurtled down the mountains. Waterfalls became torrents, rivers swelled and the sea, whipped up by the wind, hurled itself on the foaming shore. A husky voice began to sing of disappointed love, of abandonment and the underworld. I was seized by the misery that sometimes overwhelms a happy drunkard, and I was moved to tears by the desolate passion she described. Suddenly the music stopped, as abruptly as a vase breaking, and the voice fell silent.

All around me the officers were looking at each other, stunned and at a loss for words. After bidding us farewell, the apprentice geisha put away her samisen, gave a little bow and slipped away with a rustling of her kimono.

Moon Pearl keeps begging my parents to let me go with her to the new mayor’s birthday celebrations. She is convinced that her husband will be going with his mistress, and is determined to catch him in the act.

Mother couldn’t resist her tears. I find my sister’s jealousy despicable, but I do want to get out and see people… and Min may be at the party.

“Ladies, good evening…”

The footmen at the bottom of the stairs greet us with effusive little bows. One of them goes ahead of us, inviting us to enter through a red lacquered gateway, and we walk across three successive courtyards. As Moon Pearl doesn’t want her husband to see her, we have arrived after dark.

We are shown into a huge garden where about a hundred tables are dotted around under the trees and lit with good-luck lanterns to wish the mayor a long life. An orchestra in evening dress is battling desperately with its waltz tune against an opera troupe singing at the top of their lungs.

We wend our way discreetly towards a table sheltering under an umbrella pine and settle there like two huntsmen waiting for their prey. To dispel the chill of early spring, our host has lit braziers and torches, and as soon as she sits down my sister complains that the flames are blinding her and she won’t be able to recognize her unfaithful husband. I scour the area around us, looking for my brother-in-law, and I suddenly catch sight of Jing wearing a European suit and sitting alone at a table, away from the crowds. He is watching me.

I go and join him.

“Would you like some rice wine?” he asks.

“No, thank you, I can’t stand it.”

On a sign from Jing, a waiter appears and dots a dozen dishes around the table. With a pair of chopsticks, Jing serves a few slices of translucent meat into a bowl for me.

“Taste it,” he says. “It’s the pad of a bear’s paw.”

This meat, which is highly prized by the Manchurian aristocracy, slithers over my tongue. It doesn’t taste of anything.

“Here,” he says, “this is camel’s foot marinated in wine for five years. And this is the fish they call black dragon, taken from the depths of the River Love.”

Instead of tasting the food, I ask him whether Min is here.

“No,” he says.

To hide my disappointment, I admit that I was dragged here by my sister and that I don’t even know what our host, the new mayor, looks like. He points out a short, fat man of about fifty wearing a brocade tunic.

“How do you know him?”

“He’s my father.”

“Your father!”

“You’re surprised, aren’t you?” says Jing with a cold little laugh. “Before the rebels attacked, he was a council member to the former mayor. One man’s death is another man’s making. My father would manage to get himself promoted even in hell!”

Embarrassed by his admission, I can’t think how to move away.

“Look, that’s one of my stepmothers,” says Jing, pointing rather obviously at a woman who is greeting the guests like a butterfly alighting on flowers to gather nectar. She is wearing too much makeup and a richly embroidered tunic lined with fur, and a fan-shaped headdress sprinkled with pearls, coral and muslin flowers-clearly a priceless antique.

“She was a whore before she became my father’s concubine,” says Jing derisively. “She sleeps with a Japanese colonel now. Do you know why she dresses herself up as an imperial lady-in-waiting? She has always claimed to be descended from a deposed family of the pure yellow banner [11]… Now, this is my mother coming over. How can she accept that harlot under her roof?”

Following Jing’s gaze, I can make out the silhouette of a middle-aged woman. Behind her I suddenly catch sight of my brother-in-law with his hair slicked back and wearing an ostentatiously elegant suit. I ask Jing whether he knows him.

A smile appears at the corners of his mouth.

“Is that your brother-in-law? The informer?”

“Why informer? My brother-in-law is a respected journalist.”

Jing doesn’t answer. He pours himself a large glass of wine and drinks it down in one. He is a friend of Min’s, but he inspires a disturbing mixture of disgust and admiration in me. When I leave him, I am so confused that I can no longer find my sister’s table.

My friends persuaded themselves that I had fallen for the apprentice geisha and they invited her to our banquets as often as possible. I flushed every time she appeared. The winks and stifled laughs that my brother officers exchanged irritated me, though they also inspired an obscure feeling of pride and happiness.

Sunlight was shy and always left quickly after she had sung, but as time went by she agreed to serve us food and to have a drink. She had tiny hands, and her fingernails were like antique pearls. When she brought her glass up to her lips, the sleeve of her kimono slipped down her arm, revealing a dazzlingly white wrist. Would it be like gazing on a snowfield to see her naked?

My pay at the time only just allowed for me to arrange the occasional dinner and I was in no position to keep a geisha. Time went by and my ardor cooled; I needed more accessible women to brighten the austerity of military life.

Politically that year was like a leaden sky: we dreamed that the storm would break, letting the sun shine through once more. As soldiers, we could neither take a step back nor shy away from the situation, and a number of lieutenants [12]chose martyrdom. There were more and more assassinations, and the young assassins would then hand themselves over to the authorities to prove their loyalty. But neither their own terror nor these voluntary deaths could do anything to jolt our ministers out of their inertia. They were so afraid of a return to the Kamakura era [13] that their only thought was to keep the military as far from power as possible.