It was our first visit to the house of Mr Fujita Masatomi. It began with a formidably ample meal during which we scandalised our hosts by enjoying raw tuna, then clam, then squid, then (Mrs Fujita having to make a special trip to the kitchen, driven by a sense of baffled desperation and patriotic duty)-several quivering gobbets of raw sea-urchin.
Sensing our hosts' bewilderment and anxiety I diplomatically confessed that while I could stomach the sea-urchin it was not exactly to my taste. I coughed faintly and covered my mouth, as if politely concealing a grimace of disgust. The day was saved. National pride was salvaged and restored. My wife deftly consolidated this little victory by preferring coffee when offered either that or Japanese tea.
The time had come, our host solemnly decreed, for interesting conversation. I fell back on a trusty gambit. I told him, in Japanese, that I found his house very comfortable and his tokonoma particularly impressive. Mr Fujita turned to his brother and wife and the rest of his large family and told them, in Japanese, that I found the house very comfortable and the tokonoma particularly impressive. In clear English his daughter told us I was being unnecessarily polite: it was an old house and nothing to get excited about. Mr Fujita and his family, who did not understand English, grinned and nodded as if to corroborate this remark, which I therefore took as a standard expression of modesty. No, I insisted in formal Japanese, you are quite wrong, your house is actually very nice.
My words seemed to come as a bit of a surprise to Mr Fujita but he turned and repeated them to his family as before. His daughter maintained that the house was unremarkable, was in fact rather ugly, and noted there were problems with the plumbing. In Japanese I told her the plumbing had seemed fine on my last visit to the washroom, which, in conventional Japanese manner, I compared favourably with our own humble facilities.
Mr Fujita shot a quick glance at his daughter. She said in English that she hated living at home and would leave if she were a few years older. In Japanese I told Mr Fujita he had a charming girl. Not at all, he said, resorting to the traditional phrase, not at all...
It had been a heavy lunch. We were all getting tired. My wife's face had that ominously inflated look that shows she's smothering a yawn; Mr Fujita's brother leaned back from the low table, stretched himself full length on the tatami floor, and did not stir for the rest of the afternoon.
"The old folks are always sleeping," Mr Fujita's daughter complained. "Sometimes it's impossible to wake them up."
Mr Fujita barked a command in brusque Japanese. His children wheeled a television set and a VCR into the room while he selected a tape and loaded the machine. Everyone (except Mr Fujita's snoring brother) moved briskly to their new stations. Cups and scraps of food were efficiently evacuated. I had the feeling that if the premises were searched, a detailed schedule of the afternoon's proceedings would sooner or later appear.
"Karaoke," Mr Fujita announced, beaming in anticipation. He drew a large microphone from a drawer under the VCR and plugged it into the speaker of the television set. For some time I had been expecting this to happen.
Mr Fujita performed scales to warm up.
"Karaoke means 'empty orchestra,'" Mr Fujita's daughter explained. I told her in Japanese that I knew it. "Empty," she went on in English, "because there is only music and no voice." She swept her hand in a full circle to take in all present, then pointed at the microphone.
"We make the words ourselves," she said.
"You mean we read them," I corrected her, nodding toward the television where a glowing white pellet, like a grain of cooked rice, romped from character to character as a lyric crossed the screen...
A western model rode a black stallion along the edge of the inland sea as Mr Fujita crooned a traditional lament in his excellent baritone. Mr Fujita's daughter sang "My Way"-a western song that almost every Japanese knows. My wife and I were urged to sing a duet. A quick survey of programmes showed that only one other English song, "Yesterday," was available to us, and finally Mr Fujita found it on an old disused cassette. He hoped the quality was still reasonable.
It was. The video featured a Brylcreemed teenager brooding among cherry trees over a walletful of tiny photographs. The woman in the photographs was visibly blond. We bungled the song badly before returning the microphone.
Suddenly the footage accompanying the lyrics switched from garish colour to the shuddering, scratchy black and white of vintage newsreels. Small airplanes swooped in formation towards a burning aircraft carrier, big guns fired from the armoured decks of battleships. Two Zero fighters could be seen crashing into the sea. Mr Fujita's cozy den was filled with the sounds of battle.
I nudged my wife. "Pearl Harbour?" she whispered, her lips contorted like a ventriloquist's. I told her it looked like Midway. I wondered if our hosts were hinting that it was time to leave.
Mr Fujita's face had turned the blanched tint of the raw cuttle-fish we had eaten an hour before. His kneeling body was perfectly rigid yet seemed somehow to be inching towards the television set, like a machine on hidden ball bearings. Music had started up, the voiceless score of an old Beatles tune, and Japanese lyrics crossed the screen in silver spurts like the glimmering tracks of tracer bullets.
"I think it's 'All You Need Is Love,'" my wife whispered, beginning to giggle. I pinched her foot. "Don't you dare," I hissed.
Some of the children watched the screen while others played around Mr Fujita's peaceful brother, who lay like a casualty on the deck of a destroyer. His daughter watched the battle with rapt attention, as if she had never seen anything like it before.
Mr Fujita had now manoeuvred his mysterious body to within striking distance of the VCR. He grinned with embarrassment as his hand shot out at the on-off switch beside the screen. He missed. The volume rose to a deafening pitch and the den thundered with explosions and the sound of tubas and trombones straining towards a crescendo. The fallen brother twitched in his sleep, as if having a bad dream. Just as a Zero fighter on a kamikaze mission whizzed into the deck of an aircraft carrier, Mr Fujita's fingers found the on-off switch and the television went dark.
"Ma, jubun desu," Mr Fujita said. "That's enough television for now. The children tend to watch too much, you know. The daughter especially."
The daughter frowned. "He's full of it," she said in English.
Mrs Fujita burst from the kitchen with a fresh pot of coffee. The daughter began to whisper in my wife's ear; my wife struggled to contain a smile. Kneeling by the blank television Mr Fujita glanced up, his eyes darting like searchlights as the children flew around him with their arms stretched out, swooping and banking and making engine sounds. The brother trembled again in his sleep.
