“We can’t find Sihot.”

Chapter Four

Tales of the Riverbank

2/2/1942

I was walking along the riverbank, watching the sunlight reflect silver off the backs of the low-flying terns, when up ahead I saw my friend Private Oshiira sitting beside a pool bathing his flaky feet. He looked a little sad. I approached him.

“Why do you look so sad?” I asked.

“Why, it’s nothing to bother you with, Major,” he said.

“Come on, old fellow,” I said. “It’s such a nice day, nothing could bother me.”

“Well,” he said, “my father always told me a man should find himself a skill and perfect it and offer it to those who don’t possess that skill. After thirty years in the army it appears that my skill is cleaning latrines.”

“And you are very good at it,” I reminded him.

“Don’t get me wrong. It’s true. I am a genius when it comes to getting a shine out of old taps. You could eat your dinner off the floor when I’ve finished mopping. So I took my skill to the town temple, and through the Japanese interpreter, I offered to clean the temple whenever I was off duty. The abbot seemed very pleased. To me it was like a sign from heaven that my skill had been accepted. On my first evening I washed and polished all the Buddha images, especially the one they called the Great Lightness. They all shone when I’d finished. But the next evening when I returned, the abbot led me to the Great Lightness and looked at me with disappointment in his eyes; and deservedly so. The face of the Great Lightness was smudged and greasy and had no shine at all. I couldn’t understand what had happened.

“That evening I dedicated an hour to the Buddhas, and before I left, the Great Lightness was shining brighter than even my most famous bathroom attachments—work that was mentioned in war dispatches to Tokyo. But the next day and the next, the abbot awoke to a grimy, greasy, smudged Lightness. And today he told me he didn’t want my services anymore. That’s why I’m so sad.”

It was a true mystery, one that I was determined to solve. At nightfall I crept into the temple grounds. The moon was just a sliver but it afforded me enough light to see a queue of local women each bowing to the Great Lightness, saying a prayer and holding the Buddha by the ears and kissing his face with lips greasy from sticky rice and fermented fish. This behavior was quite rightly abhorred by the Buddhist council, which is why the ladies came under the cape of darkness. I learned later, you see, that the Great Lightness was believed to bestow sexual prowess on husbands and fertility on wives.

My course was clear. The next day I instructed Private Oshiira to leave his toilet brush and bucket at the foot of the Great Lightness.

“But I never use a toilet brush to clean the Buddhas,” said Oshiira. “That would be sacrilegious.”