East is East

Hiro’s mother was bright, very bright, a high school graduate whose test scores were among the best in her class—a girl for whom even the august Tokyo University was not an impossibility—charming, pretty, ebullient and, at nineteen, a failure. She didn’t want Todai or Kyoto University or any of them. She didn’t want a career with Suzuki or Kubota or Mitsubishi and she most emphatically didn’t want to bury herself in the kitchen or the nursery. What she wanted, desperately, with an ache that ate at her like the gnawings of hunger, like the insomnia that hollowed out her nights and drained her mornings, was to play American rock and roll. Onstage. With her own band. “I want to play Buffalo Springfield, Doors, Grateful Dead and Iron Butterfly,” she told her mother. “I want to play Janis Joplin and Grace Slick.” Her mother, a housewife in a nation of housewives, was firmly opposed to it. The music was foreign, devil’s music, grating, sensual and impure, and the proper place for a young woman was in the home with her husband and children. Sakurako’s father, a salaryman who’d worked all his life for Kubota Tractor, who dined, golfed and vacationed with his colleagues and had a plot reserved in the company cemetery, exploded at the mere mention of rock and roll.

The upshot was that Sakurako left home. She took her bleached jeans and her guitar and went to Tokyo, where she made the rounds of the clubs in the Shibuya, Roppongi and Shinjuku districts. It was 1969. Female guitarists in Japan were as rare as loquats in Siberia. Within a month she was back in Kyoto, working as a bar hostess. When Doggo stepped through the door, yenless, with his hair and beads and jeans, with his boots and tie-dyed shirt, his fingertips callused from the friction of the cold steel strings of his guitar, she was lost.

He allowed her to feed him and buy him drinks, and he told her about L.A. and San Francisco, about the Sunset Strip and the Haight and Jim Morrison. She found him a sensei

who taught shamisen and koto to the geisha of Pontochō, the ancient district of Kyoto, and in his gratitude he moved in with her. The apartment was small. They slept on a mat and smoked hippie drugs and made love while listening to scratchy records of hippie bands. Hiro had no illusions about it. His mother was a bar hostess—she knew a hundred men, coquetry was her business—and the picture of her life played like a grim documentary in his head. She became pregnant, the room shrank, rice suddenly tasted odd and the odor of cooking saturated the walls, and then one day Doggo was gone, leaving behind the cracked photo and a sound of plucked strings that chimed through the interstices of her solitude. Six months later, Hiro was born. Six months after that, his mother was dead.

And so, Hiro was a half-breed, a happa,

a high-nose and butter-stinker—and an orphan to boot—forever a foreigner in his own society. But if the Japanese were a pure race, intolerant of miscegenation to the point of fanaticism, the Americans, he knew, were a polyglot tribe, mutts and mulattoes and worse—or better, depending on your point of view. In America you could be one part Negro, two parts Serbo-Croatian and three parts Eskimo and walk down the street with your head held high. If his own society was closed, the American was wide open—he knew it, he’d seen the films, read the books, listened to the LPs—and anyone could do anything he pleased there. America was dangerous, yes. Seething with crime and degeneracy and individualism. But they’d driven him out of school in Japan—he was lower than the Burakumin, who collected the garbage; lower than the Koreans, who’d been brought over as slaves during the war.

And so, Hiro went to sea on the Tokachi-maru, the most decrepit, rust-eaten hulk to fly the Japanese flag, went because the ship was bound for the U.S.A. and he could go ashore and see the place for himself, see the cowboys and hookers and wild Indians, maybe even discover his father in some gleaming, spacious ranch house and sit down to cheeseburgers with him. And so, Hiro became Third Cook rather than the officer he might have been had they let him finish merchant marine high school, suffering the abuse of Chiba and Unagi and all the rest—even here, even at sea he wasn’t free of it—and so, he consulted Mishima and Jōchō and struck down his enemies and wound up in the brig, humiliated, living with the groans and pleas of his attenuated gut and two balls of rice a day.