The Heat of the Sun

some sixty years ago: 1877 on your American calendar. A year that perhaps means little to you, but in Japan it is the year of the Satsuma Rebellion, when
Takamori, last of the samurai, led his army of forty thousand against the forces of the new Meiji government. My father died in that rebellion – yes, on the losing side. Naturally, I never
knew him; I was an ugly fat baby, clamped to my nurse’s breast, far away in our palace at Omaru. But often I have wished I could speak to him. I should tell him he was a fool. Why cast in his
lot with Takamori? Already the Meiji had entrapped us, an age of iron and lead; Tokugawa and all its gold lay as deep in the past as Lady Murasaki and The Tale of Genji. The golden world was
over, crushed by time, from the moment the Americans in their black ships appeared in Edo Bay.
    ‘ Manifest destiny , that was your name for it, your progress of pillage and plunder, first across one continent, then around the world. Were you to be denied the rich ports of
Asia?’ He snorted. ‘Ports! In the beginning, that was all. But the doors were flung open then. Our hemisphere fell into the clutches of your race. Was it our destiny to be your colony?
Were we Chinamen? Were we Indians? No! We would never surrender. We would adopt your ways. Modernize. Compete.
    ‘That was the dark bargain of Meiji: iron horses, clanking factories, telegraph wires that webbed the sky. We turned on our land as if we hated it – we had to, in order to save it.
Did you know, Mr Sharpless, that your Commodore Perry was a hopeless drunkard? He died raving, eaten by the ravages of his weakness. And this, this foul-breathed swaggering American, was the man
who plunged a great and ancient people into shame!’
    As Yamadori’s words crept over me I suspected this was a monologue he had delivered often. But should I – American, though I barely felt it – hold myself responsible for
Commodore Perry?
    Yamadori continued: ‘I grew up in ignorance, Mr Sharpless. Cosseted product of a tendril of royalty that had withered on the vine, what chance had I? Yes, there were our family lands, our
old retainers; I wanted for nothing, but nothingness gnawed at my heart. My tutors encouraged me in the callow paths of pleasure. At an early age I was sent to America. Travels in Europe followed.
By the time I came into man’s estate, I was thoroughly cosmopolitan. Some would call me deracinated, though how deracinated can a man be whose very appearance – his skin, his eyes
– proclaims his origins at every turn?
    ‘Oh, I was not given over wholly to my foreigner’s life; there was business to attend to here and I came back often in young manhood, if always with an eagerness to be off again to
Vienna or Paris or Rome, and the mistresses and boon companions who beguiled my hours there. I admit I partook of the pleasures of this port – how many marriages did I contract, flickering
affairs of a few weeks or months, with the sweet little protégées of a fellow called Goro?
    ‘Then came the one girl I could not forget. I dare say I appeared a bumptious fool the day I stood before her, offering my hand. I blush to think of it. Here was my heart, enraptured, and
all I could display were the gestures of the libertine, taking his pick among playthings in a house of ill-repute – for such, Mr Sharpless, is the power of vice to pollute our attempts at
purity, to coarsen our overtures to our own salvation.
    ‘Hear me, speaking like a Christian! But when that girl stood before me in a kimono embroidered with a dragon’s coils, I knew I had lost myself long ago and only through her could I
find my way home again. What beauty that girl possessed: a girl whose ruin, like mine, stemmed from the days of the Satsuma Rebellion and the alliances contracted by her father then – a girl
fallen low, but one whom I could raise up, restoring her to her rightful place! For yes, this I would have done, had the American Pinkerton not stolen her heart.
    ‘I was abandoned by history, Mr Sharpless. Love, when at last I found it, might have compensated for my losses. But love, too, was snatched from me by history. Could I, like my country a
half-century before, have been more abjectly cast down? I vowed to leave Japan and not come back.
    ‘And I almost kept my vow. Never once, through what remained of Meiji and the effete years of Taish ō , did I return. My exile was lonely, a stage, perhaps, through which
I had to pass, for