It is in Seoul, Korea, when China first tells him. Japan knows - obvious, really - that this exchange could only happen on foreign soil, in an airplane terminal, in a secular pilgrimage for no-smoking bathrooms and linen amenities. The modern banality erodes their patina of formality - it's the only way, he suspects, pleads, something like that, the only way he can be addressed as Honda Kiku from a peculiar man named Yao Wang. They carry too much of their country, too much of their landscape in themselves (the sediments of the Huang He are settled in China's bones). Here, in the international arches (so sedated, so new, so undigested and sterile, so infuriatingly neutral and untouchable), they can be close and near.
This couldn't happen anywhere else. This much is obvious to both of them. This realm is their home, their hearth; here, they can rummage through worn wood and claw at acid roofs. Not in America with its skyscrapers and bridges; not in Europe with its riots and literature (where men intoxicate and entice themselves; not wine, not vice); and certainly not in the Near East where words bleed; no, only here will do. Here, in the Far East. In Seoul, Korea (Not in Tokyo and never - ever, spits Yao, ever - in Beijing. Kiku is familiar with this vitriolic rage. In cameras and press-rooms, China is tempered by 'Western political rhetoric and diplomacy', but it is always Yao who makes sure to dispense it with an oppressive glare, grazing at its failure, its splendour, its misery, its morphing face. And when he does, the scripted words become fumes, and Kiku's breath becomes coated with soot, his lungs with smog. It's not the hate that does it - Kiku doesn't think Yao is capable of hate anymore - it's the clinical detachment, the glottal ease that gets to him. They can't talk about their history anymore; they've ritualized the acts, the vestiges of hatred. It's ornamental, decorative: palaces, temples, shrines, pagodas...).
Kiku knows Yao will break, crack in two. He cannot hold, he has no center. Centuries of dynasties have eroded him, schism after schism, fantastical romances and melodramas in a cyclical flight, like a stray at its own tail. Or something more seethingly mournful, Kiku thinks, lips tightening. A Tokugawa Ouroboros. China has never been a mutt. He's a dragon, why he has always been the terror of the East - and will be, long after the West declines a second time, after the world collapses into inbred fighting, past the barren limbo of multinationalism... (but Yao enjoys it, doesn't he? The ugliness, the deformity, the barbarism... the makeup of warriors, slashed and stabbed, caked on, deadly and vicious as his courtly sleights... "These are my flesh and blood, rough and honest, my ancestry. They made me Han."). As early as Kiku can recall, Yao's mothering habits had a mystically aflamed undertone (and a choleric overtone), too glazed and far away, unreachable. If he hadn't been burdened with the mantle of China, he would have made a terrifying human (Kiku has always believed this). One of those concubines who made death glamorous or one of those mothers who reigned her little emperor sons with an iron leash (crowns and collars and jewelry are just another form of slavery).
Kiku will bend before he breaks, because while he, too, has been devoured by something foul inside, something wretched, some rift (a Fat Man and a Little Boy had once blinded him, had shackled him to a bed while an American with golden hair stood over him like a god (the crescent of the hospital light a halo), kissing him with apologies and anointing saliva to rosy skin, and in turn he left blots in this man's hold, against the jut of his warm clavicle), it is something viciously different (more docile, more complacent; an effigy of himself was burned, something else was erected in its, his, flames).
China would rather resurrect a wall in a storm; Japan would watch the muted roar behind a pane of glass ("All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason... half-gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood," someone told him). Japan's a step out of reality - it's like he's seeing it behind a bridal veil, standing precariously on some far-flung pedestal (but a pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space). Nothing seems real, everything is slower, more textured, richer, imprinted in his palms... he feels too much and one day he will board a plane, a train, the subway, and simply vanish, lost to the platform edge. A breath too hard, maybe, and he'll dissolve into the godless architecture with its mournful rows of column. He was born, deaf and glassy-eyed, to inherit Seoul's international airport with its nice business suits and corners.
Kiku spies Yao's spine scrape at the travel guide in his lap (no dog-eared corners, just peeking cat-shaped post-its). The characters betray the reader: 杭州 (Hangzhou) ("Heaven has Paradise but China has Hangzhou," someone with lovely arms told him once when he was small, his face nestled in the crook of a jade neck, opium euphoria spinning webs at the corners of his vision - that probably did something on his perception, Kiku notes). He has half a mind to shed it from sight before Yao is able to smack it to the tiles. Kiku expects fury (he will either be burnt by the roar or blinded by the gale).
Instead, he is treated to a jeering smile.
"读万卷书不如行万里路," ("Reading ten thousand books is not as useful as travelling ten thousand miles," someone with lovely lips told him once over a half-finished bowl of rice in the alley markets of a Chinese Venice) Yao says curiously. The way he stands in front of Kiku, bold and resolute, blocking the glass sheets overlooking the runway. How like a god, Kiku muses. "There's a saying," Yao continues, "that Heaven..."
His mind wanders.
广州, Guangzhou. 2007.
"日本人和狗禁止入内."
No Japanese and dogs allowed.
"-that Heaven has Paradise and China has Suzhou," Kiku finishes quietly when the words cling like moths to Yao's lips and beget impotent dust in the air.
"...No," Yao closes the gap between them and Kiku knows there are no people to stare at this time when the earth is cracking the sun like an egg (yolk spilling out through Yao's hair - how like a god... how terrible). "Whoever told you that had too much cloud in his eyes. Think, little boy (a pit opens in a place where Kiku's heart would have been), you saw those cackling louts and onion chewers in Hangzhou... Does that seem like god's country to you...?"
He's not going to answer. ("...real gods require blood...")
"I was saying... 天高皇帝远." ("Heaven is high, and the Emperor is far away.")
黄浦公园, Huangpu Park. c.1890s.
"中国人和狗禁止入内."
No Chinese and dogs allowed.
Yao does look so far away, Kiku agrees. Even while close and near, he is far and gone... Human hearts were never meant to hold as gods; they can't sustain themselves. Human hearts with human kindness, anger, vengeance... They lost out so long ago... They lost so much. All they're left with is history ("It's personal," China told Japan once. "This isn't some textbook bullshit... Cut through all of that. Your words mean nothing when there is so little, (he's angry, he's alternating between breaking porcelain and being porcelain) so little mind?so little heart? (he's grasping for words to define the betrayal) behind them. Only speak when your words are better than silence. Mankind fears a man but Heaven does not. You will be cut down for your insolence, your bull-headed arrogance. I will ensure it.").
For China, his mountains bleed under his nail beds; his flesh and blood geography; his memories history ("Don't memorize history with hatred," China tells a young Japan. "The memories are all you'll have left. You must hurt people but never hate them. That is too cruel... A dog won't forsake his master because of his poverty, and a son (Japan wrinkles his nose... 'public before private, country before family'...) should never desert his mother for her shortcomings.").
杭州, Hangzhou. 2007.
"謝謝, China..."
(Xie xie, thank you, arigato)
"Stop pretending, you don't need this book (I do, Kiku wants to cry. I do... If I don't, I'll be by myself and that might destroy me). You've been there. You've left yourself there. I bear your mistakes. I am proof of your memories. I'm sick of these niceties. They are almost as bad as lies."
The man speaking is China, but the voice is Yao's.
Somewhere, Kiku guesses, I over-reached. I wanted to be an Empire... always living in the sun. I wanted to touch the skies... they are high, and the Emperor (the gods) is (are) far. To forget history is betrayal, but to consecrate it to hatred... he can't live with that.
Yao's forehead rocks against Kiku's, his arms gripping the seat's. Kiku could stay like this forever, contained, his hands enveloping the back of Yao's head, alternating between here and there, then and now. If I am to be lost in translation, Kiku begs, I would like some company.
Yao breaks first, hand cusping forehead, looking off to the side. And, true to his word, Kiku will bend before he breaks: he blows a wisp of Yao's hair from his face before leaning the arch of his neck off the back end of the seat.
The sun spills through the windows. We are not so far from Heaven, Japan thinks, not when we're here in an international airport in the in-between land with the skies above us (and beneath us, soon) who are in-between people, just shades...
And when in doubt, Japan is only a flight away from Heaven in China.