“Why would she threaten you with a knife?”
I cleared my throat, wiped my nose on one sleeve even though it didn’t need to be wiped, laced my fingers together and cracked my knuckles, and at last said, “Well, see, she left the door open to Six-C, and I kind of like took a tour of the place.”
Poker face or not, he couldn’t quite conceal the fact that my nosiness struck him as offensive. “Why would you do that?”
I was not ready to tell him that I had seen her strangled and dead in a dream. “I don’t know. She’s … different. I kind of … maybe I had a crush on her. A crush at first sight.”
His stare was direct, and somehow I met it, and after a moment he said, “That will be good enough for now. We all have things to say that can be said only when the time is right to say them.”
Although I considered telling him more, I shrugged and looked at my feet as if they were fascinating, as if I might break into a dance at any moment.
Mr. Yoshioka sighed. “I keep my head down, Jonah Kirk. I do not make a great noise as I pass through the years. I do not allow myself curiosity about women … like Miss Eve Adams. Head down. Head down. I do not wish to shine. I prefer shadows, quiet, periods of solitude. I do not wish to be noticed. If one is all but invisible to others, one cannot be envied, inspire anger or suspicion. Near invisibility is a way of life that I recommend.”
“You think Eve Adams might really kill you?”
Although his hands hardly trembled now that he’d put away the pieces of the photograph, he remained disquieted—and too embarrassed to look at me. “There are worse things than death. I do not think the threat was to me. It is, as it appears, to the tiger screen. I cannot risk the screen. It is too valuable.”
“Valuable? But didn’t you say it was just some kind of copy, not the original?”
“It is more valuable than the original.”
“How can that be? I mean, if it’s not an antique.”
Raising his head, he met my eyes. He seemed to want to reveal something of importance, but then he said, “I only came to warn you.”
He stepped into the hallway and quietly pulled the door shut between us.
I heard no receding footsteps.
After a beat, through the door, Mr. Yoshioka said, “Jonah Kirk?”
“Yes?”
“Lock the deadbolts.”
“All right.” I did as he asked.
With one ear to the door, as I listened to the tailor walk away, I thought perhaps his embarrassment arose from his lack of courage, from his determination to keep his head down, to be nearly invisible. That possibility made me sad. And worse than sad.
In those days, when you were, like Mr. Yoshioka, an American of an ethnic group whose former homeland had in the not-too-distant past waged and lost a world war, or if you were of a people who had only recently begun to emerge from a century of segregation following generations of slavery, the heroes in books and movies tended not to be like you. We could believe in the characters John Wayne inhabited and admire the grace and humility with which he played heroic men; we could agree that the honor and integrity and courage that were the essence of his image should be values we, too, embraced, but we couldn’t see ourselves as John Wayne or imagine he was us. Sure, there was Sidney Poitier, but in those days he played mostly in self-consciously liberal films, raising awareness of injustice rather than taking down bad guys. Taking down bad guys is fundamentally what you want in your model of a hero. Bill Cosby, on TV in I Spy, had the physicality and attitude to make bad guys wish they’d been good, but he mostly did so with humor, wit, and smarts, and you never felt he was at risk, therefore didn’t need courage. My generation of blacks had two main sources of heroes—sports stars who broke through race barriers and famous musicians—who neither beat up nor shot down villains as part of their job description. When it came to inspiring ethnic icons of heroism in pop culture, Mr. Yoshioka had fewer men to emulate than I did. Japanese American sports stars were unknown in those days, and the only Japanese singer to make the charts was Kyu Sakamoto, whose “Sukiyaki” went to number one in 1963, even though the lyrics were entirely in Japanese.
Back then, I had a narrow definition of heroism. My conclusion that Mr. Yoshioka lacked courage arose from ignorance, as later I would learn. After you have suffered great losses and known much pain, it is not cowardice to wish to live henceforth with a minimum of suffering. And one form of heroism, about which few if any films will be made, is having the courage to live without bitterness when bitterness is justified, having the strength to persevere even when perseverance seems unlikely to be rewarded, having the resolution to find profound meaning in life when it seems the most meaningless.
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