Please Enjoy Your Happiness by Paul Brinkley-Rogers Page B

hear the sound of my voice. Maybe you will remember how hard I fought to vanquish the demon of broken English.
    Again Love,
    Yukiko
    You were laughing very hard on the train platform at Yokosuka station as I told you stories from the cruise. You clutched myarm and squeezed it tight. ‘My plan is working,’ you said. ‘You met me when you are a boy. Now you are becoming a man. I am responsible for that. I am so happy.’ If there is one image of your face that has persisted over the years it is the way you looked at that moment. The way you looked at me remains – the look a woman of the world gives a man in his youth that can never be repeated again.
    We were waiting for the train to Hayama, a small resort town with a beach south-east of Kamakura. You had reserved rooms there.
    ‘Yes, I am a wicked woman,’ you said, with a sly smile, when I looked embarrassed. ‘But don’t worry. We will read books and write poetry all night because we cannot be lovers.’
    You were chuckling. I was even more embarrassed.
    ‘Do you know that many hundreds of years ago at the court, there were always beautiful women reading books and keeping diaries and writing poetry? Love affairs often began when a gentleman saw beauty in a woman’s calligraphy before he even saw her face. In the diary of the aristocratic woman Shikibu Izumi, there is a poem. I can remember this poem. Yes, here it is in my notebook. Please listen carefully.
    ‘Thinking of the world
    Sleeves wet with tears are my lovers
    Serenely dreaming sweet dreams:
    There is no night for that.’
    I remember many stories you linked to your recitation of verse, Yuki. Sometimes I wondered if you had been a schoolteacher at some point in your life. I would listen closely, very closely, because these tales often were magical and you delighted in mydelight as I listened. You created a hush of silence by putting your fingertip on my lips. And then you told me that many of these women were locked away with nothing else to do but think and imagine a world outside those great court walls and castles. Lady Murasaki, for example, wrote the world’s first novel, the first psychological novel, the first modern novel:
Genji monogatari
[
The Tale of Genji
], an esteemed classic about love and intrigue familiar to Westerners doing Japanese studies. Also, you said that a noblewoman, Sh ō nagon Sei, wrote
Makura no s ō shi hyoshaku
[
The Pillow Book of Sei Sh ō nagon
], a journal packed with poetry, gossip, observations about court life, and lists of things to do. Both books were first published almost exactly one thousand years ago. Here is the brief passage from the
Pillow Book
that has always made me laugh, even as it did the first time we discussed it, Yukiko, when you behaved, in a fit of giggles and tickles, as if you had written it yourself:
    It is important that a lover should know how to make his departure. To begin with, he ought not to be too ready to get up, but should require a little coaxing: ‘Come, it is past daybreak. You don’t want to be found here’ . . . and so on. One likes him, too, to behave in such a way that one is sure he is unhappy at going and would stay longer if he possibly could. He should not pull on his trousers the moment he is up, but should first of all come close to one’s ear and in a whisper finish off whatever was left half-said in the course of the night . . . Then he should raise the shutters, and both lovers should go out together at the double-doors, while he tells her how much he dreads the day that is before him and longs for the approach of night. Then, after he has slippedaway, she can stand gazing after him, with charming recollections of those last moments.
    ‘I take books like those when I travel by train so I can also be transported back to those lovely times as well as to my destination,’ you said, slipping that big fat notebook full of pillow-style notations into your purse. ‘Those great women were strong. Sei Sh ō nagon was a