I studied him closely. Pressed white shirt, maroon-and-red tie, nicely fitting trousers. He was, I had to admit, an impressive-looking man. “I suppose the two go hand in hand,” I said, noticing that he was almost exactly my height. His hair, too, was combed in much the same way as mine, parted to the right — though his looked somewhat neater. He had much broader shoulders than mine and his frame suggested that the rest of his body bore similar musculature under his immaculate clothing. Nothing was out of place with him — everything in appallingly perfect proportion. Next to him, I suddenly felt very skinny and malnourished.
Though our rooms were at opposite ends of the rest house, I expected that our paths would cross — over breakfast, say, or when taking tea on the verandah. Two educated gentlemen, each with a background that might interest the other: I certainly wasn’t inclined to avoid him the way I might have had he been European. But I rarely saw him. Often he remained in his room for long periods; other times he would slip away noiselessly, and it became impossible for me to tell if he was in or out. When I was certain that he was in his room, I would listen at my door for some clue as to the activities behind his firmly closed door. Nothing — not even the scrape of a chair on the floor or the closing of a cupboard door. We were the only two people at the rest house and yet we remained solidly encased in our separate cells.
One morning I left the rest house to join Johnny on his continuing quest for a new house. I had bicycled some distance before I realised that I had forgotten my camera, a handsome Leica (stolen, no doubt, from some unsuspecting foreigner) I had bought “secondhand” for a few dollars from a rickshaw-puller in Singapore. As I approached the rest house I heard music. It was so perfect and so strange in this setting that it took me several moments to realise that it was really playing, that my imagination wasn’t running wild in this tropical heat. It was music I knew well and held very dear — I had in fact been humming the tune some days before—“Porgi, amor,” from Le Nozze di Figaro. I knew, as I entered the house, that it was coming from Kunichika’s room. I felt compelled to share my enthusiasm for this music with him, and so I went to his room and knocked on his door. The music stopped immediately, and after a few moments Kunichika opened the door, looking perfectly soigné and unruffled.
“What marvellous music,” I said, “and how lovely to hear it played here. I haven’t heard that in a long while — except in my own head, of course, where it replays endlessly.”
He stood squarely in the barely open doorway; behind him I could see only a low, empty set of bookshelves. “Thank you,” he said simply.
“Do you have a gramophone? You must have taken some trouble to bring it here.”
“Yes, it was slightly cumbersome.”
“All the way from Japan?” I continued, feeling myself wilt slowly under the steadiness of his gaze. “I wouldn’t have associated the Japanese with opera — well, apart from Madama Butterfly of course and, oh, Turandot—no, that’s China, isn’t it? I take it you listen to a lot of opera?”
“Only a little. I studied in Europe for a time.” His manner of speech was legato as legato can be, flowing effortlessly from the depth of his chest to his throat to his perfectly drawn lips. He lifted a hand to smooth his already smoothed hair, and I noticed the quiet gleam of his signet ring. Instinctively, I reached to feel my own ring; I could have sworn that his was, in shape, weight, and colour, identical to mine.
“Well,” I said, shifting on my feet, “perhaps we might exchange views on Mozart sometime.”
“Yes, perhaps,” he said, closing the door.
