The Phoenix Tree

Why don’t you hand me a white feather? Okada thought. ‘I’m a farm worker from out of town. Someone has to grow the food to feed you soldiers.’

His tone was curter than it should have been; he would have to learn more courtesy. The spokesman looked at his companion, then back at Okada. ‘You ought to have more respect for our uniform.’

Oh, come off it! Then again he realized he was not at home. ‘I apologize. I was not disrespectful of your uniform.’

He bowed his head and went to step past the two soldiers. But the shorter of the two, the quiet one, stepped in front of him. He was thin and wizened and had a soul to match; though he did not admit to a soul. He had also been drinking, an indulgence that had kept him quiet up till now. He came out of a fog of saké. ‘Someone as big and healthy as you should be wearing a uniform. Let the women and the old men work the farms.’

‘There are no old men on our farm and my mother is too sick to work in the fields. The authorities decided I should stay and work the farm.’

Okada Wanted to brush the two soldiers out of his way and escape towards the station. Passers-by were looking at them, though so far no crowd had gathered; Okada was grateful for Japanese politeness. Then he saw the two soldiers in helmets coining down the street, long sticks in their right hands; he could smell military police fifty yards away. He began to sweat and hoped it wasn’t showing on his face.

He decided there was nothing to do but attack: ‘Here come two military police. Perhaps you’d like to call them and have them arrest me? They’d appreciate a drunken soldier calling on them for help.’

The taller of the two soldiers looked over his shoulder, then grabbed his companion’s arm and hustled him down the street. The half-drunken soldier snapped an obscenity at Okada, but allowed himself to be led away. Okada looked after them, pleased at how his attack had worked; then he turned to walk on and found the two military police coming towards him. One of them held up his stick to bar Okada’s path.

‘Were those two soldiers annoying you?’ It was difficult to tell whether the man who had spoken, a corporal, was being courteous or sarcastic.

‘They were just asking the way, corporal,’ said Okada. ‘They were not annoying me, not at all.’

‘Where are you from? You have a different accent from the people around here.’

His own accent was middle class and Okada wondered if there was a different system for recruitment of Japanese military police. He decided now was as good a time as any to take the plunge. ‘I am from Saipan. I escaped from there in September.’

‘You ran away?’ The corporal was as tall as Okada, met him eye to eye.

‘Yes,’ said Okada. ‘I saw ten thousand die for the Emperor, but the Americans weren’t impressed.’

It was a dangerous statement to make: he was still not thinking Japanese. But the corporal’s expression didn’t change. ‘One doesn’t die to impress the enemy. But maybe you Saipanese think differently. You may find it very difficult back here in the homeland.’

‘I do,’ said Okada with heartfelt emphasis.

Then the corporal unexpectedly smiled. ‘You’ll survive. How is the war going down there?’

You’re losing it, just as you’re losing it everywhere else. ‘Not well. But all isn’t lost yet.’

‘Of course not.’ But the corporal’s smile suggested he might be thinking otherwise. He nodded to his partner and the two of them, acknowledging Okada’s bow of the head with upraised sticks, moved on down the street. Okada, aware of the now not-so-polite stares of the passersby, moved quickly on his way towards the station, which he could now see at the end of the street.

He had cleared his first hurdle, but it was no more than a low brush fence in what might prove to be a marathon steeplechase, where the hurdles would get higher, would be topped with thorns and have deep ditches on the far side. He remembered a Hearst Metrotone newsreel of the English Grand National and the frightening jumps that the horses had had to negotiate. The horses had had it easy.

When he got into the station he found it was crowded. A hospital train must have just come and gone; wounded soldiers lay on stretchers in neat rows like packing-house carcases. Civilians would occasionally stop by one or two of the more conscious wounded and say a word, but no fuss was made; Okada could imagine the bright-smiled activity of Red Cross volunteers if these were American wounded coming home. He saw a few medics hovering near the men on the stretchers, but there did not appear to be any doctors. He had heard stories in the field of how Japanese doctors had neglected the wounded, as if the latter had shirked their duty as soldiers, by getting in the way of a bullet or a piece of shrapnel.

He pushed his way through the crowd, joined a queue at the single ticket office. Twenty minutes passed before he reached the window. He asked for a ticket to Nayora.

‘Where’s your pass?’ The clerk was old and tired and had a voice that sounded like a rusty-edged saw.

Okada had the quick wit not to say ‘What pass?’ He had seen the man in front of him push across a piece of paper, but he had thought it was some fare concession certificate. Now he realized that, for all their thoroughness in briefing him, Embury and the others had missed out on some small details; small but important. Okada decided to make use of his accent.

‘I’ve just landed here. I’m from Saipan and Luzon. I came up on the same ship as those men along there.’ He nodded towards the wounded beyond the line behind him. He had no idea where the soldiers had come from, but he took the risk that the ticket clerk also did not know. ‘I still have to get all my papers.’

‘Can’t give a ticket without papers.’ The clerk quickened the saw of his voice. ‘Stand aside.’

Okada stood aside, feeling conspicuous; he glanced covertly around to see if there were any police nearby. He could see none, but he moved hastily away from the window before the clerk became too conscientious and started yelling for the arrest of a man trying to travel without a pass. Okada cursed San Diego for its ignorance, but the cursing relieved neither his feelings nor the situation. He moved to the outskirts of the crowd, down towards one end of the platform.

He was standing there, debating his chances of crossing the tracks and trying to swing up into the train from the wrong side when it came in, when a voice beside him said, ‘Want to buy a pass?’

He looked sideways at the man and had to choke the laugh in his chest. He looked like Joe Penner, or anyway a Japanese version; and though he had spoken in Japanese, he had exactly the same delivery as the comedian: ‘Wanna buy a duck?’ But this man would sell anything, the hustler at the world’s railroad stations.

‘Genuine or forged?’ Okada said.

‘Makes no difference. The old man in the ticket office wouldn’t know – all he wants is a bit of paper.’

‘How much?’

‘Twenty yen.’

‘You could sell me a girl for the night for that.’ They had given him those sort of details, as if sex had a place in the price index.

‘Of course. But she couldn’t carry you to wherever you want to go.’

Okada looked around. No one was watching him and the hustler; then he saw the soldier on the nearest stretcher staring straight at him. For a moment he felt a sense of shame; then he put it out of his mind. He had no obligation to this soldier, the man had not been fighting for him. He took out a twenty-yen note and gave it to the hustler. The man, with a smile as forged as the pass, handed over a piece of paper.

‘This had better work, or I’ll come looking for you and break your neck.’ Okada tried to sound menacing, but the hustler seemed unimpressed.

‘Have a good journey,’ he said, and went off with a bent-kneed walk that looked more like Groucho Marx’s than Joe Penner’s.

Okada looked at the pass; it looked genuine enough to be accepted. Then he turned back towards the line in front of the ticket office. As he passed the end of the stretcher line he looked down at the wounded soldier, who was still staring accusingly at him. He paused, wanting to say something to the man but unable to think of anything: scorn upset him, even that of an enemy. Then he saw that the soldier was beyond scorn or any other opinion: he was dead. Okada bent and gently closed the sightless eyes.

When he reached the ticket window again the old clerk barely looked at him as he presented the pass and asked for a ticket to Nayora. Maybe he knew the hustler and his black market in passes; or maybe he was just another very minor bureaucrat who would settle for any piece of paper so long as the system was not disrupted. He certainly was not looking for a spy travelling without the proper pass.

The train came in half an hour later. Okada caught it, stood in a crowded compartment and wondered if he would have any difficulty with Natasha Cairns when he made contact with her this evening. He felt exactly as he had as a boy and a young man: in his father’s homeland but not at all at home.

3

‘Every nation must be taught its proper place,’ Chojiro Okada had said. ‘If every country in the world were allowed its own sovereignty, there would be nothing but anarchy. Japan would not be at war with America if the Americans had only understood that.’

Tom had always been respectful in his arguments with his father; it was the only way the arguments could be continued. ‘Dad, there’s no natural hierarchy for nations—’

Chojiro Okada waved a hand of dismissal. He had a working man’s hands, roughened and blunted by his early years in America, but they were capable of graceful movement. ‘Of course there is. Why do you think the British and the French and the Dutch founded their empires?’

‘I always thought it was for trade—’

‘That was only part of it. They all three consider themselves superior to the people they colonized. They have no right to be in Asia. We Japanese are the superior ones in Asia, we are the ones who should be teaching the others their proper place.’

Chojiro Okada had been preaching the same doctrine to his son ever since the invasion of Manchuria in September 1931, when Tom had been fifteen years old. The boy, intent on his own small battles in high school, had listened politely but without interest. Chojiro had tried to tell him that his own private battles had been far worse. But one could never tell the young about the past, there was never any comparison in their eyes with the present, neither for good nor for ill.

‘There’s none so blind as the young,’ he said.

‘What?’ Tsuchi, his wife, was busy cooking supper. She had become accustomed to his talking to himself, if only because she had forced him into the habit.