The Key to Midnight

insult to the customer as well as a tasteless reminder of an unpleasant subject.
        So they ate sushi two pieces at a time, and Alex thought about how desperately he wanted Joanna. They drank tea, and Alex wanted her more with each sip that he watched her take. They talked, they joked with Toshio, and when they weren't eating they turned slightly toward each other so their knees rubbed together, and they chewed bits of ginger, and Alex wanted her. He was sweating slightly and not merely because of the fiercely hot wasabi in the sushi loaves.
        His inner heat was almost acute enough to be painful. That pain was the risk of commitment. But nothing worth having could be had without risk.
        More things than sushi came best in twos. A man and a woman. Love and hope.
        

    * * *
        
        White faces. Bright lips. Eyes heavily outlined in black mascara. Eerie. Erotic.
        Ornate kimonos. The men in dark colors. Other men dressed as women in brilliant hues, bewigged, mincing, coy.
        And the knife.
        The lights dimmed. Suddenly a spotlight bored through the gloom.
        The knife appeared in the bright shaft, trembled in a pale fist, then plunged down.
        Light exploded again, illuminating all.
        The killer and victim were attached by the blade, an umbilical of death.
        The killer twisted the knife once, twice, three times, with gleeful ferocity, playing the midwife of the grave.
        The onlookers watched in silence and awe.
        The victim shrieked, staggered backward. He spoke a line and then another: last words. Then the immense stage resounded with his mortal fall.
        Joanna and Alex stood in darkness at the back of the auditorium.
        Ordinarily, advance reservations were required by every kabuki theater in Tokyo, but Joanna knew the manager of this place.
        The program had begun at eleven o'clock that morning and would not end until ten o'clock that night. Like the other patrons, Joanna and Alex had stopped in for just one act.
         Kabuki was the essence of dramatic art: The acting was highly stylized, all emotions exaggerated; and the stage effects were elaborate, dazzling. In 1600, a woman named O-kuni, who was in the service of a shrine, organized a troupe of dancers and presented a show on the banks of the Kano River, in Kyoto, and thus began kabuki. In 1630, in an attempt to control so-called immoral practices, the government prohibited women from appearing on stage. Consequently, there arose the Oyama, specialized and highly accomplished male actors who took the roles of female characters in the kabuki plays. Eventually women were permitted to appear on stage again, but the newer tradition of all-male kabuki was by then firmly established and inviolate. In spite of the archaic language - which few members of the audience understood - and in spite of the artistic restrictions imposed by transvestism, the popularity of kabuki never waned, partly because of the gorgeous spectacle but largely because of the themes it explored -comedy and tragedy, love and hate, forgiveness and revenge - which were all made bigger and brighter than life by the ancient playwrights.
        As he watched, Alex realized that the basic emotions varied not at all from city to city, country to country, year to year, and century to century. The stimuli to which the heart responded might change slightly as people grew older: The child, the adolescent, the adult, and the elder didn't respond to exactly the same causes of joy and sorrow. Nevertheless, the feelings were identical in all of them, for feelings were woven together to form the one true fabric of life, which was always and without exception a fabric with but one master pattern.
        Through the medium of kabuki, Alex achieved two sudden insights that, in a moment, changed him forever. First, if emotions were universal, then in one sense he was not alone, never had been alone, and never could be alone. As a child cowering under the harsh hands of his drunken parents, he had existed in despair, because he'd thought of himself as isolated and lost. But every night that Alex's father had beaten him, other children in every corner of the world had suffered with him, victims of their own sick parents or of strangers, and together they had all endured. They were a family of sorts, united by suffering. No pain or happiness was unique. All humanity drank from the same river of