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Harry meets with his mistress Lady Alice Beechum — wife of Sir Arnold, the British ambassador , tries to hide the fact from Michiko, runs his bar, the Happy Paris, makes his speech at the Chrysanthemum Club, meets other friends Japanese and American, for drinks and gossip, is present at the small group for drinks where Willie tells the story about Ishigama, meets his schoolboy friend and nemesis Lieutenant Gen, now in the Japanese Navy, for conversations about oil or lack thereof for the Japanese war effort. In a separate plotline he is being investigated and followed by Sergeant Shozo of the Special Higher Police, also known as the Thought Police, and his goon assistant Corporal Go.
They have been tipped off about his involvement in the Magic Oil experiments of Dr Ito, and turn up at the Yokohama dockside offices of one of the oil companies whose books Harry is fiddling to make it look like oil is being offloaded in Hawaii. Plus involvements with various local gamblers and a strand where Harry swaps all the cash he has for gold from a friendly pawnbroker. Altogether, these intertwining plotlines and strands form a wonderful fabric, a tapestry of stories and adventures and scams, each of them shedding light on different aspects of Japanese culture, and tradition, building up a persuasive sense of life in Japan of the period.
But it is only in the last pages or so that Ishigama finally catches up with Harry.
It is in the willow house, a geisha house opposite his bar. Harry has returned from various meetings and adventures to discover his own bar dark and locked up. And the willow house opposite is strangely quiet. It is unlocked. He takes his shoes off and tiptoes along the hall until he hears a voice calling his name. In a genuinely bizarre scene, he discovers Colonel Ishigama quietly kneeling at a traditional Japanese table with his immense super-sharp samurai sword lying on it, attended by an immaculately painted geisha girl.
Ishigama is infinitely polite and solicitous. He asks the geisha for hot sake. Harry knows that if he makes one false move or says something wrong, Ishigama will whip up the sword and behead him faster than he can move. It is the standout scene in a novel full of strikingly vivid, beautifully imagined scenes. Ishigama calmly and politely informs Harry that he Harry owes him Ishigama five heads, the five heads he never got to take off back in China.
He is drunk as a skunk. He makes it right up to the entrance of the back room when Ishigama abruptly swoops to his feet, with one stride is at the doorway, and with one enormous sweep of the sword cleaves DeGeorge from shoulder blade to belly button.
All the talk is of conflict, and most of the Americans who can leave Tokyo have already done so. There are a lot of other plot strands. Jun prefers a really private life, even when it comes to saying what the color of his curtains are. She had been bound and gagged with plastic ties and scarves, with one of her hands lying outside the mixture. The officers noticed somebody in the apartment even though no light was visible. Retrieved 28 September
Neither Harry nor the geisha has moved. As I say, powerful scene. In the event it slowly dawns on Harry, to his amazement, that the geisha is none other than his fierce lover, Michiko. All kinds of speculation goes through his mind.
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Was she always a geisha on the side. Who painted her so elaborately, every geisha needs an assistant? Was it Ishigama, a psychopath famed for his aesthetic abilities? In which case, did she service the brutal sadist? More sake! And the three toast each other as if nothing had happened.
Ishigama is neutralised. He smiles. Before they can stop him he leaps through the paper wall of the room and is into the garden and beyond. Then Harry is picked up by the Thought Police and taken to a prison where he sees the manager of one of the oil companies whose records he had faked, bound to a table and beaten senseless with bamboo rods. Sergeant Shozo is very polite, offers him a cigarette, says this will happen to him unless he tells them what he knows about the secret oil tanks at Pearl Harbour.
They only beat Harry a little and eventually and a bit inexplicably, to me they let him go. Harry makes his way back to central Tokyo and spends the remaining or so pages of the book in increasingly desperate attempts to inform the American ambassador, and then his mistress, Lady Beechum, that he is now convinced a Japanese attack is coming very soon. The ambassador, cornered at a swish Japanese golf course, simply pretends to ignore him.
Lady Beechum tells him noone will believe him; he is the most discredited man in Tokyo. Then there is another encounter with Ishigama, in the street which is interrupted by news announcers blaring from every streetside loudspeaker — that Japan has launched a surprise attack on the American fleet and utterly destroyed it. People stream out of their houses, cheering. Ishigama is lost in the torrent of people.
All the plotlines come together. His old schoolboy friend Hooper explains it is partly because he is persona non grata with both the American and British ex-pat community. But more because the Japanese want him. Finally Ishigama catches up with him, helped by his oldest schoolboy frenemy, Gen, giving rise to a prolonged chase through shops and back alleyways until Harry finds himself, unwittingly, tumbling once again through the door into the dressing room of the Theatre Folies, where he had tumbled all those years ago.
Now it is dusty and abandoned and now, on its empty stage, the last gruesome scene of the novel takes place. You will not be surprised to learn that heads roll. But I think you should read this immensely enjoyable to find out whose. Willie Staub — member of the Nazi Party, former managing director of China Deutsche-Fon — who was with Harry back in Nanking, China, then married Iris, a Chinese woman, who he is desperate to help get away with him back to Europe.
Ishigami — the young army officer who deflowers the boy Gen, and gives him and Harry a display of samurai swordsmanship, who Harry cheats out of his Chinese beheadings in Nanking, and then pursues Harry implacably through the second half of the novel like an avenging Fury. Kato — artist and printmaker, who teaches Harry and the reader the aesthetics of Japanese prints and design; after Harry lets Gen take a print to Lieutenant Ishigama — who seduces him — Kato drops Harry as unreliable.
Sergeant Shozo of the Special Higher Police — thoughtful and playful officer who unwaveringly pursues Harry to find out if he was lying about the oilfields at Hawaii. Taro — sumo wrestler, twin of Jiro, who joins the navy and is killed, whose ashes Taro receives on the main day.
Admiral Yamomoto — head of the Imperial Japanese Navy who Harry is introduced to by a nervous Lieutenant Gen eight months earlier, whose trust Harry wins by playing poker with him, and who then asks for Harry to come and watch the conman Dr Ito perform his fraud of supposedly turning spring water into oil. Second is the way he can make language jive and shimmy. By contrast Cruz Smith is a poet. He can make the language jive and shimmy in totally unexpected ways. You know the old archive footage where an artist like Picasso draws a couple of lines onto paper and… it is a bull! Same with Cruz Smith.
A couple of ordinary words are arranged in a novel combination which opens up an entirely new idea or sensation. In this way, not only are the novels exciting and informative but they supply a steady stream of moments when the prose leaps up and performs tricks for you.
Just that he can do in a phrase what other authors need a paragraph to do, and then injects something extra. For example, here is Tokyo as the loudspeakers at every road corner blare the news that Japan has launched and won the Pacific war. When Harry is planning to ditch Michiko in order to be on the last plane out of Tokyo sitting next to his mistress, Lady Beechum, he thinks:.
You and I were not meant to be with anyone. A crow trudged up the road and shared a glance with Harry, one wiseguy to another. The man spoke with such intensity that it took Harry a moment to find the air to answer. Every few minutes a fighter plane would pass overhead, towing its shadow across the baseball diamond and up over the slope to the airfield across the road. This immediately and vividly made me recall all the times an airplace shadow has passed over or near me. I was there. Maybe my favourite is the moment when the boy Harry pops over the wall into the garden of the house where he is to discover Ohasu having sex and being sketched by Kato, in a heavy summer downpour of rain, and:.
In a brief illumination of lightning, Harry saw the garden as it was meant to be contemplated, as small islands in a sea of perfect waves. The pebbles chattered in the rain. Only six common little words. But which convey the moment perfectly, the garden of Japanese pebbles glistening and minutely jostled by the heavy downpour. You are there. With Harry.
At the heart of the story. And Cruz Smith does this again and again with acute details and snappy phrases. Smith is a prolific writer. Under his own name or pseudonyms, he has written some 28 novels to date. Who murdered her? And why? He finds himself at the centre of a murderous conspiracy, in an alien society full of colourful music by day and prostitution and voodoo ceremonies by night, and forced to work closely with a tough local black policewoman, Ofelia Orosio, to uncover the conspiracy at the heart of the novel.
Email Address:. Follow Books and Boots. All posts tagged Michiko Funabashi. Colonel Ishigama 1 But the central driving force of the narrative is definitely is the fact that, right from the start of the book, Harry is being hunted by a certain Colonel Ishigama, who has vowed to kill him.
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