Hawaii - James Michener [571]
With bad luck Akemi could have become, and she knew it, a Hershey-bar girl, cadging nylons and canned beef from G.I.'s at Shimbashi Station, but in the earliest days of the Occupation she had been lucky enough to meet Goro Sakagawa, and he was not a Hershey-bar boy. It is true that he gave her whatever food and money he could afford, but she gave him little in return except exciting talk, a knowledge of Japan and more spiritual love than he knew existed in the world. It took Shig about two minutes to see that this pair was going to get married.
"Why does she work in a bar?" he asked Goro when Akemi disappeared to serve some customers.
"She wants to work, and she likes the music," Goro explained.
"Is she an Edokko?" Shig inquired, referring to the old name for Tokyo.
"The purest modenne," Goro laughed. Postwar Japanese youth prided themselves on their use of French, and to be modenne-- moderne--was their highest ambition. "This girl is a terrific brain," Goro confided.
"I’ll bet she's not Hiroshima-ken?" Shig teased.
"Have you seen Hiroshima?" Goro asked. "Pppssskkk!” he hissed, leveling his hand over the floor. "I don't want anything to do Hiroshima."
"Mom's going to be very unhappy," Shig warned. "You come all the way to Japan and don't have sense enough to get yourself a Hiroshima girl."
"This is the girl for me," Goro said as Akemi rejoined them, and when she came to a table, his or anyone's, she added a new dimension to it, for she contained within her slim body an electric vitality which marked many people in the new Japan.
At midnight she whispered, "Soon the customers will go, and then we have real fun." Patiently she waited for the wandering drinkers to empty their glasses, and to each straggler she said a warm good night, thus insuring their subsequent return, but when the last had gone and the proprietor was turning out the lights, she sighed and said, "I wish drinks cost less. Then men would guzzle them faster."
Opening the darkened door a crack she whispered, "No M.P.'s," and the trio ducked down a series of the smallest alleys in the world, barely wide enough for two to pass if one stood sideways, and finally they came to a darkened door which Akemi-san pushed slowly open, revealing a rather large room in which more than a dozen young men and women sat in the most rigid silence, for an imported gramophone was playing music that neither Shig nor Goro could recognize, but its name was obvious, for on a music stand, with a single shaft of light playing upon it, rested the album from which the records had been taken: Mahler's Kindertotenlied sung by a German group. Quietly the newcomers sank to the floor, and when the music ended and more lights were lit, they saw that they were among an intense Japanese group composed of handsome young men and pretty girls. When talk began, it was all about Paris and Andre Gide and Dostoevski. Much of it was in French, and since Shig had acquired a smattering of that language, he was well received.
Then talk turned to the new Japan: freedom for women, the breaking up of large estates, the new role of labor, and both Shig and Goro were able to contribute much, but just as it seemed as the old Japan were forever dead, Akemi appeared in a frail, tattered kimono which she kept by the gramophone, and the room grew deathly silent, with all assuming old, formal poses as Akemi began the tea ceremony, and as she moved through the curious and ancient ritual of making tea in a set way, and serving it just so, Shig sensed that these young Japanese were no different than he: they were caught in the changing of history, so that with part of their minds they embraced French words and everything modenne, while with the great anchors of the soul they held fast to