The Comfort Woman
By David Whitehouse
In the 1920s, when she was small, she adored the life-sized tigers that her father painted on the sliding paper doors that separated the tatamae rooms at home. He was a coalminer, and the family lived in the small village of Kitamatsu on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu.
When she was a teenager, she started to take part in the annual village summer festival. She was one of the girls who each July donned bright blue kimonos and struggled through the humid evening in their wooden sandals with the rest of the procession.
The air was smoky and damp, loaded with the smells of grilled fish. The men carried a huge painted plaster dragon, mounted on a wooden palette, on their shoulders. After the rain started, the kimonos with their red sashes became wetter and more revealing and the girls danced more keenly to the cacophony of beating drums and clanging bells.
As she danced there was a tiny needle of light in her mind that told her there would be trouble. It was the same slither of light which had soundlessly intimated the previous year that her brother would come home from school camp in the mountains with a broken arm.
When the procession finished, she said to her father that she wanted him to take her home. He wouldn’t listen and kept drinking beer in the village square with the rest of the men. Their songs got louder and cruder. Then she saw him with the shiny red eye of the dragon in his hands, trying to thrust it under his coat. He was a poor man and the eye could be sold for at least a month’s wages.
Then he was down in the mud and she could see the crowd of men kicking, kicking him again and again until the eye slipped from his hands and into the mud. She pushed against the mob to try to reach him but she couldn't get through. No-one heard her as she screamed at them to stop.
Ten years later, in 1937, Japanese soldiers invaded China. She was still living in Kitamatsu with her elderly mother. Her brother had married and moved to another village. The tigers on the doors, which had been as large as life, were now shrunken and faded, and marked by dirty children's fingerprints.
The soldiers came to the house and seized her. They wanted to use her to stop Japanese troops raping their way indiscriminately across the eastern Chinese seaboard, which would have inflamed local resistance to the occupation. They wanted her to control China. With her one body she was to hold the Chinese at bay for her masters.
At the military base in Shanghai she wore a tatty grey kimono and lived in a tiny hut that had insects crawling on the floor. As she was raped every day, 10 times a day or even more, sometimes by two at once, she began to concentrate on the tiny needle of light that still existed in her mind.
The eye of the needle became a little wider and seemed to become a tunnel that was inviting her to enter. Each day with the brutes inside her she would crawl a little further along the tunnel. One day the tunnel got wider and she was able to stand up. It felt solid under her feet. She looked down and she could see the brutes down there, one between her legs and one at her ass and she suddenly felt that they were fucking a corpse. She could also see outside the hut, the slack-jawed, unshaven soldiers smoking and waiting their turn. The tunnel opened out endlessly before her. She stepped forward into the light and was gone.
* * *
Nagasaki
We started early in the morning. The drive from our home in Fukuoka city on the southern Japanese island of Kyushsu took about three hours. It was the school holidays and the group was comprised of my wife, our kids, and my wife’s extended family. There were nephews, nieces, cousins. They were all Japanese and I was the only foreigner.
On the approach to the Nagasaki we stopped at a service station. I stood and stared at some kanji, complex Chinese pictographs that number in their thousands. These were imported into Japan in ancient times and, in a kind of linguistic skin transplant, grafted on to the existing native language. Each one has its own meaning, as well as a variety of possible pronunciations; Japanese sounds for basic nouns, Chinese ones for more abstract compounds.
I stared at a group of three of these letters that seemed suddenly to swim together to give a rare glimpse of clarity.
-Life . . . science . . . application! I said to my wife. I was sure that she would be pleased with my progress.
-So that must be the drug store, right? I asked her. -But how do you pronounce it?
-It means female hygiene, she said, slapping me on the arm. -Monthly cycles. Don’t stand there with your mouth open! She giggled. -Hurry up, will you, everyone's waiting!
We headed on into the city. The houses seemed to cling like limpets to the sides of a few vertical mountains. Not a good place to ride a bike. Or buy a piano. Or get old. To be fair, the locals’ English didn’t seem to be much better than my Japanese. For example: Meat Is the King of Material. This sign was outside a butcher’s shop and was presumably intended to attract custom from the local American military base.
Our next stop was the reconstructed Dutch trading settlement at Dejima. For the two centuries that ended in the 1850s, this was the country’s only point of contact with the outside world. As we strolled around I decided that the Protestant Dutch merchants had been much more sensible than the Catholics in Japan. Not only did they avoid being thrown into boiling water, always a risk for an over-zealous missionary, but they were housed in spacious tatemae-floored houses during their annual trading visits.
The Japanese prized the silk and spices that the Dutch brought, and so hand-picked women from the city were made available to entertain them. In fact, these were the only locals allowed into contact with the Dutch: you really needed a good reason to be allowed access to the settlement. The term ‘Dutch wife’ is still used in Japanese. These days it means ‘blow up doll.’
I started to imagine myself as a Dutch merchant seaman chilling out in a high-security comfort zone. But then one of our children charged across a carefully restored dining room. An alarm went off and a security guard came running. I wrestled the kid back under control. There was sweat glowing on the guard's neck as he wagged his finger at me.
From Dejima, our ragged army toiled uphill through the afternoon heat. We were bound for the Church of the Twenty-Six Martyrs, built in remembrance of the mixed group of Japanese and foreigners who were crucified for preaching Catholicism. It struck me as we climbed that the hill was a worse than average place to get crucified.
Personally I have always been agnostic, at least since the long-ago night when a German student of philosophy pounded on a beer-soaked table in a furious response to my declaration of atheism. He told me I was ''unlogisch''; the existence of God could not be proved either way.
I couldn't argue with him. But how could I label myself? Thomas Huxley, finding himself similarly confused a century earlier, had coined the term "agnostic" so that he might have "a tail like all the other foxes.'' Apparently the Pope has now said that agnosticism is cool. So, I reflected as I climbed, a modern Catholic missionary would probably be obliged to let me keep my tail.
In the toilets outside the church, I grimaced as a small boy relieved himself squarely on my light tan trousers.
Inside, it was a surprise to find that the church floor was flat and not sloping uphill towards the altar. I sat in one of the pews and thought about the butcher’s shop sign. Meat, the material king. The reason the sign here seemed so weird, I reckoned, was because in the west we like things to be capable of moving, like a person, before we start calling them the king of this, the king of that. Or start worshipping them as gods, for that matter. We like to see something that we can imagine as a proof of human control if we try hard enough. At home we have Burger King, but the king is not the meat itself. It's a human figure. It's either some Colonel Sanders-type guy lurking in the background, or the staff collectively who are the burger-flipping kings.
The Japanese Shintoists, on the other hand, don't care about whether something can move or looks like a person. They don't need the illusion of human control. They worship stones, the wind, the sun, mountains, waterfalls. It's the agnostic creed par excellence. There's hardly anything in the way of fixed belief, but an endless array of natural spirits to cut out and keep.
-Are we going to the hotel now? I said to my wife. I wanted, I merited, fresh trousers, dinner, beer. My leg was warm and damp and it wasn’t even my own kid that had done it.
-No, she said. We’re going to the atomic bomb museum.
I sighed. I had been there before. I remembered how the American pilots, blinded by the cloudy weather, had been just about to return to base. At the last moment a brief chink of blue in the clouds; then mangled clocks stuck for ever at 11:02 a.m.
-I’m tired, I said. –He pissed on me.
I showed her the stain on my trousers. I pointed at the culprit.
-It’ll be good for the children, she said. –We agreed, remember? You can change your trousers later. Come on.
* * *
By David Whitehouse
In the 1920s, when she was small, she adored the life-sized tigers that her father painted on the sliding paper doors that separated the tatamae rooms at home. He was a coalminer, and the family lived in the small village of Kitamatsu on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu.
When she was a teenager, she started to take part in the annual village summer festival. She was one of the girls who each July donned bright blue kimonos and struggled through the humid evening in their wooden sandals with the rest of the procession.
The air was smoky and damp, loaded with the smells of grilled fish. The men carried a huge painted plaster dragon, mounted on a wooden palette, on their shoulders. After the rain started, the kimonos with their red sashes became wetter and more revealing and the girls danced more keenly to the cacophony of beating drums and clanging bells.
As she danced there was a tiny needle of light in her mind that told her there would be trouble. It was the same slither of light which had soundlessly intimated the previous year that her brother would come home from school camp in the mountains with a broken arm.
When the procession finished, she said to her father that she wanted him to take her home. He wouldn’t listen and kept drinking beer in the village square with the rest of the men. Their songs got louder and cruder. Then she saw him with the shiny red eye of the dragon in his hands, trying to thrust it under his coat. He was a poor man and the eye could be sold for at least a month’s wages.
Then he was down in the mud and she could see the crowd of men kicking, kicking him again and again until the eye slipped from his hands and into the mud. She pushed against the mob to try to reach him but she couldn't get through. No-one heard her as she screamed at them to stop.
Ten years later, in 1937, Japanese soldiers invaded China. She was still living in Kitamatsu with her elderly mother. Her brother had married and moved to another village. The tigers on the doors, which had been as large as life, were now shrunken and faded, and marked by dirty children's fingerprints.
The soldiers came to the house and seized her. They wanted to use her to stop Japanese troops raping their way indiscriminately across the eastern Chinese seaboard, which would have inflamed local resistance to the occupation. They wanted her to control China. With her one body she was to hold the Chinese at bay for her masters.
At the military base in Shanghai she wore a tatty grey kimono and lived in a tiny hut that had insects crawling on the floor. As she was raped every day, 10 times a day or even more, sometimes by two at once, she began to concentrate on the tiny needle of light that still existed in her mind.
The eye of the needle became a little wider and seemed to become a tunnel that was inviting her to enter. Each day with the brutes inside her she would crawl a little further along the tunnel. One day the tunnel got wider and she was able to stand up. It felt solid under her feet. She looked down and she could see the brutes down there, one between her legs and one at her ass and she suddenly felt that they were fucking a corpse. She could also see outside the hut, the slack-jawed, unshaven soldiers smoking and waiting their turn. The tunnel opened out endlessly before her. She stepped forward into the light and was gone.
* * *
Nagasaki
We started early in the morning. The drive from our home in Fukuoka city on the southern Japanese island of Kyushsu took about three hours. It was the school holidays and the group was comprised of my wife, our kids, and my wife’s extended family. There were nephews, nieces, cousins. They were all Japanese and I was the only foreigner.
On the approach to the Nagasaki we stopped at a service station. I stood and stared at some kanji, complex Chinese pictographs that number in their thousands. These were imported into Japan in ancient times and, in a kind of linguistic skin transplant, grafted on to the existing native language. Each one has its own meaning, as well as a variety of possible pronunciations; Japanese sounds for basic nouns, Chinese ones for more abstract compounds.
I stared at a group of three of these letters that seemed suddenly to swim together to give a rare glimpse of clarity.
-Life . . . science . . . application! I said to my wife. I was sure that she would be pleased with my progress.
-So that must be the drug store, right? I asked her. -But how do you pronounce it?
-It means female hygiene, she said, slapping me on the arm. -Monthly cycles. Don’t stand there with your mouth open! She giggled. -Hurry up, will you, everyone's waiting!
We headed on into the city. The houses seemed to cling like limpets to the sides of a few vertical mountains. Not a good place to ride a bike. Or buy a piano. Or get old. To be fair, the locals’ English didn’t seem to be much better than my Japanese. For example: Meat Is the King of Material. This sign was outside a butcher’s shop and was presumably intended to attract custom from the local American military base.
Our next stop was the reconstructed Dutch trading settlement at Dejima. For the two centuries that ended in the 1850s, this was the country’s only point of contact with the outside world. As we strolled around I decided that the Protestant Dutch merchants had been much more sensible than the Catholics in Japan. Not only did they avoid being thrown into boiling water, always a risk for an over-zealous missionary, but they were housed in spacious tatemae-floored houses during their annual trading visits.
The Japanese prized the silk and spices that the Dutch brought, and so hand-picked women from the city were made available to entertain them. In fact, these were the only locals allowed into contact with the Dutch: you really needed a good reason to be allowed access to the settlement. The term ‘Dutch wife’ is still used in Japanese. These days it means ‘blow up doll.’
I started to imagine myself as a Dutch merchant seaman chilling out in a high-security comfort zone. But then one of our children charged across a carefully restored dining room. An alarm went off and a security guard came running. I wrestled the kid back under control. There was sweat glowing on the guard's neck as he wagged his finger at me.
From Dejima, our ragged army toiled uphill through the afternoon heat. We were bound for the Church of the Twenty-Six Martyrs, built in remembrance of the mixed group of Japanese and foreigners who were crucified for preaching Catholicism. It struck me as we climbed that the hill was a worse than average place to get crucified.
Personally I have always been agnostic, at least since the long-ago night when a German student of philosophy pounded on a beer-soaked table in a furious response to my declaration of atheism. He told me I was ''unlogisch''; the existence of God could not be proved either way.
I couldn't argue with him. But how could I label myself? Thomas Huxley, finding himself similarly confused a century earlier, had coined the term "agnostic" so that he might have "a tail like all the other foxes.'' Apparently the Pope has now said that agnosticism is cool. So, I reflected as I climbed, a modern Catholic missionary would probably be obliged to let me keep my tail.
In the toilets outside the church, I grimaced as a small boy relieved himself squarely on my light tan trousers.
Inside, it was a surprise to find that the church floor was flat and not sloping uphill towards the altar. I sat in one of the pews and thought about the butcher’s shop sign. Meat, the material king. The reason the sign here seemed so weird, I reckoned, was because in the west we like things to be capable of moving, like a person, before we start calling them the king of this, the king of that. Or start worshipping them as gods, for that matter. We like to see something that we can imagine as a proof of human control if we try hard enough. At home we have Burger King, but the king is not the meat itself. It's a human figure. It's either some Colonel Sanders-type guy lurking in the background, or the staff collectively who are the burger-flipping kings.
The Japanese Shintoists, on the other hand, don't care about whether something can move or looks like a person. They don't need the illusion of human control. They worship stones, the wind, the sun, mountains, waterfalls. It's the agnostic creed par excellence. There's hardly anything in the way of fixed belief, but an endless array of natural spirits to cut out and keep.
-Are we going to the hotel now? I said to my wife. I wanted, I merited, fresh trousers, dinner, beer. My leg was warm and damp and it wasn’t even my own kid that had done it.
-No, she said. We’re going to the atomic bomb museum.
I sighed. I had been there before. I remembered how the American pilots, blinded by the cloudy weather, had been just about to return to base. At the last moment a brief chink of blue in the clouds; then mangled clocks stuck for ever at 11:02 a.m.
-I’m tired, I said. –He pissed on me.
I showed her the stain on my trousers. I pointed at the culprit.
-It’ll be good for the children, she said. –We agreed, remember? You can change your trousers later. Come on.
* * *
Try some of my poems:
Callused Hands
http://callusedhands.blogspot.com/2009/06/issue-4.html
Subtle Teas
http://www.subtletea.com/davidwhitehouse2009.htm
Aireings
http://www.aireings.co.uk/Issue5/Issue5.htm#gree
http://www.aireings.co.uk/Issue3/3-33JWhiteThankyou.htm
Or my short stories at Chippens
Les Urgences
http://www.chippens.com/2009/04/les-urgences.html
Robbing Banks Isn't Big or Clever
http://blog.chippens.com/2010/04/robbing-banks-isnt-big-or-clever.html
Callused Hands
http://callusedhands.blogspot.com/2009/06/issue-4.html
Subtle Teas
http://www.subtletea.com/davidwhitehouse2009.htm
Aireings
http://www.aireings.co.uk/Issue5/Issue5.htm#gree
http://www.aireings.co.uk/Issue3/3-33JWhiteThankyou.htm
Or my short stories at Chippens
Les Urgences
http://www.chippens.com/2009/04/les-urgences.html
Robbing Banks Isn't Big or Clever
http://blog.chippens.com/2010/04/robbing-banks-isnt-big-or-clever.html