The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende Page B

for this: he looked more like a ten-year-old than the fourteen he actually was. He was not yet suffering from the merciless bombardment of hormones; he was introverted, wary, and unfortunately for him loved books and hated sports. He would never be boastful, cruel, or vulgar like the other boys, and since none of this came naturally, he tried in vain to copy them; his sweat smelled of fear. On the first Wednesday of classes he came home with a black eye and his shirt stained from a nosebleed. He refused to answer his mother’s questions and told Alma he had bumped into the flagpole. That night, for the first time he could remember, he wet his bed. In his horror, he stuffed the soaking sheets up the chimney, where they were only discovered at the end of September, when the fire was lit and the house immediately filled with smoke. Lillian could not get her son to explain what had happened to the sheets either, but she guessed the reason and decided to intervene. She went to see the headmaster, a red-haired Scotsman with a drinker’s nose, who received her behind a regimental desk in a dark-paneled room presided over by a portrait of King George VI. He told Lillian that a proper dose of violence was seen as an essential part of the school’s educational methods. That was why they encouraged tough sports, quarrels between students were resolved in a ring with boxing gloves, and discipline infractions were punished by caning on the backside, which he himself administered. Blows made men. That was how it had always been, and the sooner Nathaniel learned how to gain respect, the better for him. He added that Lillian’s intervention made her son look ridiculous, but since Nathaniel was a new pupil, he would make an exception and not mention it.
    Furious, Lillian rushed off to her husband’s office on Montgomery Street but got no support there either.
    â€œDon’t get involved in this, Lillian. All boys have to go through these initiation rites, and almost all of them survive,” Isaac told her.
    â€œDid you get roughed up as well?”
    â€œOf course. And as you can see, it didn’t turn out so bad.”
    The four years of secondary school would have been endless torment for Nathaniel without help from a wholly unexpected quarter. The weekend following the beating, when he saw Nathaniel covered in scratches and bruises, Ichimei took him to the garden pergola and gave him a useful demonstration of the martial arts, which he had practiced since he could stand upright. He handed Nathaniel a spade and told him to come at him as if he wanted to slice his head in two. Nathaniel assumed he was joking and raised the spade in the air like an umbrella. Ichimei had to insist before he finally understood and made to attack him for real. Nathaniel never knew how he lost control of the spade, flew through the air, and landed on his back on the pergola’s Italian tiles, all of this witnessed by an astonished Alma, who was looking on closely. This was how Nathaniel found out that the imperturbable Takao Fukuda taught a combination of judo and karate to his children as well as other youngsters from the Japanese community, in a rented garage on Pine Street. Nathaniel told his father, who had vaguely heard of these sports, which were gaining popularity in California at the time. And so Isaac visited Pine Street. He did not really think Fukuda could help his son, but the gardener explained that the beauty of the martial arts was that they did not require physical strength as much as concentration and the ability to use the adversary’s weight and thrust to topple him. Nathaniel began the classes. The chauffeur drove him to the garage three times a week, and there he first took on Ichimei and the younger boys, and later Charles, James, and other older opponents. For several months it felt as if his body were being crushed to pieces, until he finally learned to fall without hurting himself. He lost his fear of