Soldiers in Hiding Read online

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Take Your Roof With You

  Preface

  Part One

  One

  Two

  Current Titles

  Core: A Romance

  Decline of the Lawrence Welk Empire

  God Clobbers Us All

  Things I Like About America

  Madison House

  So Late, So Soon

  Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip

  The Cantor’s Daughter

  Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories

  The Greening of Ben Brown

  Soldiers in Hiding

  September 11: West Coast Writers Approach Ground Zero

  Copyright Page

  Dedication goes here, if any.

  “Mood Indigo,” by Ellington, Mills, Bigard. Copyright 1931 by Mills Music, Inc. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. Used with permission. A poem of Bashō from The Narrow Road to the North and Other Travel Sketches, by Bashō, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasi (Penguin Classics, 1966), copyright © Nobuyuki Yuasi, 1966. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Book, Ltd. “Nansen Cuts the Cat in Two” from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, by Raul Reps. Reprinted by permission of Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc., Tokyo.

  ALSO BY RICHARD WILEY :

  Fools’ Gold

  Festival for Three Thousand Maidens Indigo

  Ahmed’s Revenge

  Take Your Roof With You

  A BAMBARA PROVERB GOES THUS: “GO TO THE VILLAGE where you don’t have a house but take your roof with you.”

  Richard Wiley’s literary strategies often recall that proverb to mind. Mostly, for many of us in non-European societies, that is, on the receiving end of unsolicited visitations, the roof of the intruder who appears to have embraced that ancient exhortation is usually made of impermeable tiles or corrugated iron sheeting. This is not what the Bambara had in mind. Obviously, those ancients envisaged the airy, light-filtering fibre thatch rather than the ponderous and presumptuous, a mobile dwelling of alienated baggage. The latter merely inhibits penetration of light and, thus, of illumination. The Frenchman André Gide is one exception that comes readily to mind. The roof that he took with him on his journeys through Africa did come close to being a refined thatch variety, even when his impressions are negative and the rendering of some of his encounters nonflattering—certainly it is impossible to deny that his Travels in the Congo is an elegant work of travelogue that matches the best in the literature of discovery.

  Yet a new generation of non-African, non- Caribbean writers—the latter being of the “return-to-roots” school of yearning—appears resolved to follow—albeit through a straightforward fictional route—the footprints of André Gide. One such is Richard Wiley, white, American, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. This writer has seemingly set out to redress the time-dishonoured agenda of the foreign intruder whose “roof ” is the ponderous, prefabricated variety, an agenda which promotes the mental impenetrability of frontiers and cultures by a distortion of differences rather than a creative delineation, even celebration, of such differences. Not for a moment, however, does Wiley take refuge in those other tempting options—to obscure those differences or exoticise them. It suffices for him that he elicits them in a narrative accessibility which, at the same time, offers a revelation of a common humanity, a humanity with all its uncertainties, foibles, dubious pasts, and petty egos at work, avoiding judgment that derives from a culture that presumes itself superior, or else the norm, against which all others must be measured.

  For those who are not familiar with the person in the writer, Richard Wiley has set himself a specific mission—to produce a novel drawn from a milieu in which he finds himself for long enough to set up his roof, observe, and interact. The writer in him homes in, naturally, on an actual event that forms part of a crucial historic or cultural experience of that milieu—in Japan, Korea, Alaska, and, most recently, Nigeria—thus transposing the traditional role of the explorer as narrator with that of the writer as adventurer, a different cast of mind from the earlier mentioned colonial imperators, and closer to the albeit condescending and libelous Joyce Cary. A difference between Cary and Wiley is the avoidance of stereotypes. It all began when Wiley found himself assigned to Korea as one of John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps volunteers—a far call from the more familiar colonial expeditioner who invaded prostrate domains, tarpaulin roofs at the ready, but also with an uprooted home-away-from-home, complete with bathtub, linen changes, silverware, and a virtual army of domestic staff, often forcibly recruited natives in the manner of Stanley, Livingstone, or John Speke.

  In what I like to consider a one-man mission of “literary reparations” to denigrating literature from that list, Richard Wiley appears not necessarily to integrate but to insert himself unobtrusively, a watchful eye and empathising listener, into alien identities, operating through plain, credible protagonists such as Teddy Maki, the Japanese-American musician conscript in Soldiers in Hiding, the most seductive and compelling—in my view—of his works so far. That preference can of course be traced to my own calling as a dramatist, but it is difficult not to succumb to the measured pace of that Noh drama vehicle that conveys and climaxes this story of identity, alienation, cruelty, tenderness, the moralities of loyalty, and ritualised cartharsis, bringing each character to a confrontation with his or her inner self, a progression towards inevitability. It is a rite of exorcism, one that ultimately reconciles individual selves with realities that have been shaped by a shared experience of disruption—the sudden, shattering intrusion of war. It is the often overwhelmed, human scale of such convulsions that is subtly delineated in Soldiers in Hiding.

  WOLE SOYINKA

  From an address at the Writers Forum,

  Brockport, New York, 1997.

  Excerpted with the author’s kind permission.

  Preface

  WHILE LIVING IN TOKYO IN THE EARLY 1970S I MET A MAN named Tib Kamayatsu. At the time he was around seventy years old, a second-generation Japanese from America who had come to live in Japan before World War II and been drafted into the Japanese army. He was a musician, had been famous in his earlier years—some still recognize his name—and rarely visited America. I thought Mr. Kamayatsu’s story was magnificent and strange—an American drafted into the Japanese army!—a dilemma worthy of a stage play, but his walk was heavy, not so much with the mantle of tragedy on his shoulders as with a muddled sense of bitterness and boredom. He rarely talked about this experience of fighting against his countrymen, which, to say the least, had piqued my curiosity. I tried several times to engage him of an evening, thinking sake might loosen his tongue, but it only made him maudlin, an odd aggression bubbling up from somewhere, and I could get no war stories out of him. Later I discovered that he wasn’t unique, that some two dozen other second-generation Japanese-Americans had also been trapped in Japan in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and slipped on Imperial Army uniforms, hoping they might survive because they looked Japanese and could speak the language, and also hoping, I am sure, to escape into the peaceful years at war’s end, unnoticed. They got caught on history’s horns and were gored by them, but they weren’t traitors, most of them, they were simply in search of adventure in the land of their fathers, in search of love, maybe, or merely doing what we all ought to do in one form or another, seeing the world.

  And Mr. Kamayatsu took whatever truly happened to him to his grave, leaving me to imagine a story of my own.

  Soldiers in Hiding was first published twenty years ago by Atlantic Monthly Press, in 1986, accepted by an editor of surpassing good taste named Joyce Johnson. I had been writing the novel for six years before it was accepted, seeing it shrink from a six-hundr
ed-page narrative opus told by multiple first person narrators—I was under the influence of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon at the time and wanted to express the unreliability of the eyewitness—to the slimmed-down two-hundred-pager that it is today. I think I thought, back then, that it was up to me to recast literature itself, not only by good storytelling and a perpetual honing and molding of the English language, but by adhering to the kind of sleight of hand trickery that many of my age, swooning over Joyce or Kafka, thought might pass as true experiment, when often it was only a copy of the true experiments that had gone on before them. We were scientists with beakers that didn’t belong to us, my fellow young scribblers and me, and I was like Mr. Kamayatsu, hiding in a uniform not my own, not a real writer but a conformist to the passing literary fashion of the times. Ah, the folly of youth! Ah, the hurdles we have to lumber over only to get to the point where we can be ourselves!

  I returned to America in 1974 but put off beginning Soldiers in Hiding until I had completed what turned out to be my second published novel, Fools’ Gold. I’d been mulling what I had learned during both my five years in Japan and my two years before it in Korea, when I was a Peace Corps volunteer: how those years had turned me from a complacent college boy, as stuck in American culture as a fat chimney sweep in a narrow chimney, into someone who saw the world through a wide-angle lens, saw it in terms of its myriad languages and the realities housed within them, at once different from my American reality and the same. I was a poor language student, near the bottom of my group in Peace Corps training, but I had persevered, and was toward the top of it when our time there was done. I don’t think the Koreans learned a thing from me, by the way, except perhaps to wonder at my antics and to try to guess my age, but what I learned from them, and from the Japanese too, when I moved across the Sea of Japan to Tokyo, is that the very structure and grammar of language seems to dictate the way we look at the world, quite as clearly as road signs dictate which avenues we may drive down, which we may not, and how fast we may go. In other words, until I left America I believed the world to be a fixed and solid thing, unaltered by the eyes that saw it, and when I returned I believed the world to be amorphous, a house with many rooms and walls that language and culture could easily shift, vastly altering its look.

  But one cannot stay with a novel, plugging away for six long years, one cannot change it from thick to thin, then back to thick, then back to thin again, on such a theory alone, oh no. During the time I worked on Soldiers in Hiding, obsessed with writing the best book I could, I was also obsessed by labyrinthine Japan. It was a conundrum to me, on the one hand shallow and trite, its own obsession with America during the decades after the war defining the word “banal,” yet on the other still deeply imbued with beauty and grace, its culture the beneficiary of 250 years of near isolation from the “modern” outside world, formed by the constant pressure of having to rely on its own invention, in much the same way as a diamond is formed by pressure from the center of the earth. At the surface Japan was positively goofy, its popular culture, like ours, determined to seek the lowest common denominator, with silliness and quick surface laughs on every face, yet one could also stroll to the corner market to buy five eggs, and leave with them wrapped in such exquisite simplicity that they hung from a weaving of dried bamboo leaves like a single throat swallowing five times. The place was both mundane and sublime, tasteless and tasteful, clumsy and delicate, and at every turn it captured me. Zen, that ubiquitous draw for every young seeker, drew me. Kyoto, with its temples and gardens, geisha in whiteface on narrow streets, became, for me, something to ponder not just of an instant, but of a lifetime, and Tokyo, where the postwar Japanese spent more on entertainment than on national defense and education combined, was my playground and watering hole.

  As much as I was poor, at the beginning, in Korean, I was good, at the beginning, in Japanese. I seemed to find the hidden zipper that held that language in, and pulled it down and stepped inside, and began to look out from there, at times at least, through Japanese eyes. Though, as is my wont with everything, I never learned the language completely enough, I had facility, and for most of the time I lived there I was a fierce guardian of my own language acquisition, even going so far as to pretend to be Czech or Lithuanian, on occasion, with those who tried to practice English with me on the streets.

  In a way, this is more a reminiscence than a preface to this book, which I hadn’t read, I have to say now, in nearly twenty years. I did read it recently, but with trepidation. What if I no longer liked it? What if I found the sentence formations that I’d loved two decades previous annoying to me now, too full of simile or overwritten? Japan was by no means out of my system after I’d written this book, for Soldiers in Hiding isn’t the only book I’ve set there. For another decade, from 1994 until a year or so ago now, I wended my way even further backward, past the agony of World War II to the mid-nineteenth century, as I worked on a kind of “prequel” to the novel you are holding now, one called Commodore Perry’s Minstrel Show. So once for six years, and once for ten, for three times longer than I actually lived in the place, Japan was the malaria that heated my undernourished brain, the flame beneath the kindling of my creativity. I returned to the country three times, remembered parts of the language I had forgotten, remembered the humidity of summer and the cold of December on the Tokyo streets, and not only walked the roads that Teddy Maki walked, up around the now quite whorish Roppongi, but traveled the paths of this second book’s making, to Shimoda and the one-thousand-man bath, to Mito and Kyoto again, where a new cast of characters strolled along, as if the past were no longer sleeping under the mikan trees, but awake again and in my hands. In the interim, during the 1980s, my family and I had ventured to Africa, to Nigeria and Kenya, to a drama and culture of another ilk entirely, and where two distinctly different sorts of novels found their way out of my festering, but even then the foothold that Japan had chiseled in the walls of my psyche never grew faint enough that I couldn’t find purchase there, and start that old climb again. How to know a place that isn’t your own? Or how to rid yourself of it?

  In the end, after putting my trepidation aside, rereading Soldiers in Hiding was pleasurable for me. It goes without saying that no one on earth could be closer to the book after six years of riding the range of its paragraphs, of reining in its excesses and branding it with my own particular eccentricities. Yet there were parts of the novel that I’d forgotten, or sublimated so completely as to be surprised, at least, like a new reader might, by their sudden occurrences. I did not remember, for example, that certain (minor) characters in the latter part of the book had even been invented by me. So when they flew into Tokyo one day, out of a clear blue winter sky, and stepped off the airplane, for me it was as if I were there to greet them at the bottom of the gangway, like the mayor of Tokyo himself, with flowers in my hands and a smile on my face. Yes, I had created them—for if not the writer, then who is the god of a story?—but I had paid so little attention to their lives since, had thought so rarely about what they might be doing during those twenty years that the book remained closed, that I was like someone’s bachelor uncle saying, “Look how much you’ve grown!”

  In other ways, also, this experience of reentering the world of Soldiers in Hiding was instructive. I am not a critic, have been short-fused with critics (and reviewers most especially) in the past, but the chance to rejoin one’s early self, to “listen in,” as it were, on those currents that often run so far below the surface of one’s consciousness as normally to be unreachable, was enlightening. Who but a writer, after all, or a very serious diarist, has that chance at all? I do suspect that most writers have the same reluctance I had concerning opening the covers of closed books, but it helped me remember that there is a thematic element to my work which dives more deeply than what I briefly outlined above; it helped me to remember that writing is like mining, in that both must first strike a vein, and then open that vein up.

  So what I can say now that my work
deals with, from Soldiers in Hiding, through that first novel published second, Fools’ Gold, from my Peace Corps book, Festival for Three Thousand Maidens, to the two set in Africa, and on to Commodore Perry’s Minstrel Show, is twofold: first, it is concerned with the predatory nature of our ethnocentrism, and with exposing that ethnocentrism as our hubristic mistake, second, with my belief that the beauty of difference, in language and habit and constancy, in art and music and national dress, in wine and in the definitions of love, in what makes us proud or ashamed, should be honored and praised, looked at and laughed at, noted for what it is, but never judged. Especially in days such as we are going through now, with cultural and capitalistic aggrandizement zooming like a rollercoaster car about to fly off its tracks, what storytelling can do is help to derail it early, before it kills every one of us.

  As I read over that last paragraph I see that literary art is political, that all art may be, however adamantly its makers might insist that it’s not. Yet at the same time art is art because of its ineffable quality, not because of what it “says” to us. Stories are stories are stories, they are celebrations of the mythical and the mysterious, and are made poignant anew, through the generations, because those who people them come alive for us. You open a book, whether for the first time or after twenty years or after two hundred, and you step into it. This, not something from Star Trek, is the true “beaming up.”

  I don’t know what makes a writer. Perhaps, as may have been the case with me, it is nothing more than a protracted childhood, a tendency to slip away from the worries of the inside of the house and linger outside of it, an Indian stalking cowboys. Or perhaps it is more inexpressible, as we are the gods of our stories, coming from gods of our own. There are nine Muses, after all, hanging around the foot of Mt. Olympus, so surely they must venture out, fly over and look down on us once in a while. The first three Muses, by the way, are named Melete, Mneme, and Aoide—Meditation, Memory, and Song. We empty our heads, we think of nothing, then we follow the memories that come to us. And if we’re lucky, the singing, whether in praise or in lament, will last us the rest of our lives.