Please Enjoy Your Happiness Read Online Free

FROM ‘ A MEETING ’, TENTH CENTURY , PUBLISHED IN
POEMS OF SOLITUDE
    There was that moment at that small, shabby hotel, on a dirt side road leading nowhere, when I found you lying on the floor, your wrists slashed, dark red blood everywhere. They told me at the White Rose that you had gone there because you were ‘unhappy’. I thought I would go there to cheer you up. When I saw you with your eyes closed and with dried blood caked on your arms, I thought you were dead. The room reeked with the dangerous smell of blood. The young hotel clerk was shaking. She was horrified. She rushed out after saying she was going to call the police. I knelt down, not knowing what to do. So I touched your cheek. It was cold, but you stirred. Your eyes opened and you looked up at me with a strange sweet smile on your face. ‘I don’t want to die,’ you whispered. ‘I don’t want to cause you big trouble.’
    And then you fainted, and I tore the bed sheet and tied your wrists to try to stop the bleeding and the next thing I knew the police were ordering me roughly in Japanese to back away. I had never known such fear. I was going to collapse myself, but then a police lieutenant wearing a tan raincoat and black beret, with one of those extraordinarily potent Peace cigarettes in his mouth, came through the door and told me in excellent English, ‘Let me take care of this. You probably should go. You don’t want to get mixed up in this. Go back to your ship. I promise you we will take care of her.’
    I looked at you. You were limp, lying with your legs apart, your arms straight out, as if you had been crucified. I could not see whether you were breathing. You were so unearthly pale that you looked as if you had been dug out of a snowdrift. You were wearing a simple white dress, a string of red plastic beads round your neck, and bright red lipstick. It was as if I had interrupted you in the middle of an elaborate ritual.
    I had that image of you in my mind as I wandered through the alleys where lives were being lived as they were in those days: The women splashing water on the sidewalks to keep down dust. The delicious onion and shrimp vapours coming from fried rice cooking in big steel pans that always made me instantly hungry. Happy children in their navy blue and white uniforms coming home from classes with black leather school bags on their backs. I could hear the melancholy sounds of an
enka
coming from one house and I guessed at that moment it was a woman singing about a lost love or a life not worth living and I wondered whether that was why you had tried to kill yourself. There was still blood on my hands. There was a tap running, and a woman watched curiously as she saw me washing the blood away. She came up to me, and I could see that shewas worried I had been injured. I did not know enough Japanese then to explain what had happened, so I thanked her and sat on the kerb while she patted me on the back as if I were a baby. It took a while for me to put everything in perspective and calm down enough so that I could continue walking to the main gate of the navy base. I did not want to talk to anyone about what had happened. I lay down on my bunk, shut my eyes, and saw that image of you that I could not erase from my mind. One of many thoughts filled me with terror: was I the reason you had cut your wrists?
    In the morning, I went back to the White Rose, not knowing whether I would be welcome. The
mamasan
(woman manager) was sitting inside by the door, which was decorated with little mementos of love tacked up by the girls (we always called them ‘girls’ and they in return called us ‘boys’) who worked there as hostesses. She wore a kind of white apron over a simple blouse and the baggy
mompe
pants farm workers wear. She also wore
geta
, the wooden sandals that make a reassuring
clip-clop
,
clip-clop
in the alleys on dark nights when hardly anything is visible. The girls working in the bar always called her, respectfully,