December 6 by Martin Cruz Smith

to nets and embarrass themselves. Immediately a law passed requiring salesgirls to wear panties, and two thousand years of fashion changed. There was, as Kato pointed out, nothing more beautiful than a kimono. A woman in a hand-painted kimono and obi was wrapped in a work of art. Western fashion was drab by comparison, but as color leached out of modern clothes, it spread into billboards and movie posters, matchboxes and postcards, race cars and airplane banners. And, of course, each word, each character in every sign or delivery boy’s jacket was a picture. Every street was a flood of images.
    Kato lived in the Ginza above a bookstore in rooms that he said were very French, very art nouveau . Harry didn’t know what France or nouveau was like, but he didn’t doubt it was exactly like this. Armchairs seemed wrapped in vines. Sconces were glass flowers on stems of brass. Even the teapot looked alive enough to hop from the brazier. French posters of ballet and cancan dancers had places of honor on the walls. Japanese prints of a young woman teasing a cat, and a geisha offering her shoulder to a tattoo needle, were strewn on a table.
    Kato said, “Hokusai and Yoshitoshi, all the great Japanese artists, were inspirations for Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. Modern art is Japanese art through French eyes.”
    The lecture was wasted on Harry. He much preferred the simple lines and secret messages of the Japanese prints. How the girl innocently batting with the cat revealed the provocative nape of her neck cowled in red. How the geisha bit into a cloth to stifle pain the same way lovers stifled cries of ecstasy.
    “Do you paint here, too?” Harry asked. He saw no easel, paints or canvas.
    “Open your eyes.”
    Harry noticed how Kato had positioned himself by the poster of a French cabaret, a line of cancan dancers with blue faces and red hair. In a corner, however, was the Japanese calligraphy of Kato’s name. The poster was an imitation.
    “You did that?”
    “Good, you aren’t totally blind. There’s hope for you yet, Harry. You help me deliver the prints on the table and we’ll meet Oharu and go to a Chinese restaurant. She loves Chinese food.”
    Harry didn’t meet Kato’s customers. It was a warm day in May, and he was happy to go along and wait outside while the artist took prints, boxed and loosely wrapped in silk cloth, around town. The last delivery was to the museum in UenoPark. UenoPark was famous for its hills of cherry trees, although the flowers had passed and the branches, dark as patent leather, were going to green. What Harry liked about the park were its drunken rickshaw men, street magicians, beggars and “sparrows,” prostitutes who carried a ready rolled-up mat. Kato seemed to know each fire-eater, mendicant and whore.
    This day, however, the usual transients had disappeared, the park was empty, sparrows flown. In a city of crowds, Ueno Park was mysteriously quiet until Harry saw red flags march over the hill, so many that the cherry trees seemed to toss in waves of red. These were followed by ranks of men wearing red bandanas tied around their heads and carrying signs that read RICE IS THE PEOPLE ’ S PROPERTY , a surprise to Harry, who had been taught at school that all the rice in Japan was the emperor’s. Some marchers were university students, but most were life-hardened workers holding their strong fists high. As they marched, their song spread across the landscape of the park: “ Arise ye workers from your slumbers / Arise ye prisoners of want …”
    ” ‘The Internationale,’” Kato said. “It’s May Day. They’re Communists.”
    It was thrilling, the unity of voices, the forward motion of history that swept up Kato and Harry. Flags seemed to set the park on fire as the phalanx swung down a wide flight of steps to the street, where a row of police waited. Like the bank of a river, the blue line of uniforms redirected the course of the march, containing it along a high stone wall.