Wartime love letter that took 50 years to write
PLEASE ENJOY YOUR HAPPINESS
by Paul Brinkley-Rogers
ASHY, bookish 19-year-old man stood shaking above a 31- year- old Japanese woman lying on a bed in a shabby motel room in the Japanese port of Yokosuka. It was the summer of 1959.
Her arms and legs were spread wide and she wore a simple white dress with a string of red plastic beads around her neck. Her wrists were caked in dried blood and, when he bent down, he found her cheeks cold to his touch. ‘I don’t want to die,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to cause you big trouble.’
Paul Brinkley-Rogers had met Yukiko only a few months earlier. She would leave him mysteriously only a few weeks later. They never even kissed. And it has taken him until his mid-70s to realise that she was the love of his life.
In his haunting memoir of their intense summer romance, the Pulitzer Prizewinning war correspondent admits: ‘I was an idiot in my youth. I made no real effort to look for you. It is only now, after my marriages, that I appreciate who you were and what you did for me.’
Two months after emigrating to America from England, the young Brinkley-Rogers enlisted in the US Navy and set sail on the USS Shangri-La, an aircraft carrier whose mission was to patrol the South China seas.
Yukiko, who had lived in Hiroshima, could never quite get over the fact that her sweetheart’s ship was named after a mythical paradise but loaded with nuclear weapons. ‘I remember you pulled out a dictionary and found the word “irony”,’ he recalls.
They met in a Yokosuka bar called the White Rose, where Yukiko worked as a reluctant hostess. Passionate about Gershwin, Debussy, Ravel and Miles Davis, she hated the noisy Johnny Cash records they played to lure in the sailor custom.
But she was thrilled to see BrinkleyRogers arrive with a book by Dylan Thomas in his hands, and told him he was, without doubt, the first man in the history of the U.S. Navy to enter a Japanese countryand-western bar with a book of poetry.
‘I was so inexperienced and tongue-tied,’ he remembers. ‘I did not know what to say. I still remember the mix of fragrance and heat, and it still has the same effect on my ageing body as it did when I was young.’
The pair would meet in bars and cafes to discuss their shared passion for books and music. The older woman encouraged her young sweetheart’s literary ambitions. He would correct her English and ‘watch like a captive’ as she applied her make-up.
These chaste scenes have an elegant eroticism that continues to burn. ‘I use a perfume I make myself that only releases its fragrance when I make love,’ she told
the virgin trembling in the shadows of her room.
As their friendship deepened, Yukiko’s attempts to pretend her life was happier than it was began to crumble. Born in Manchuria, her brutal father had worked for the Imperial Japanese Army, conducting hideous experiments on political enemies.
After his death in World War II, the highly educated Yukiko became the plaything of Hiroshima’s wealthy criminals. She escaped from one ‘boyfriend’ who abused her, but kept a short sword wrapped in violet silk for the inevitable day when the gangster tracked her down.
Brinkley-Rogers later found out she had a daughter. It was this child’s death — and not her doomed love for him — that prompted the motel room suicide attempt.
‘I am a blue woman,’ she wrote to him aboard the ship where his officers warned him against getting caught in the web of Japan’s ‘ spider women’. Between 1947-1959, 31,080 Japanese women became war brides.
But Yukiko was not among them. She vanished after one final dance — Brinkley-Rogers’s white uniform pressed against her black dress — before the Shangri-La sailed for good.
She shook his hand and left a letter in which she wrote, for the first time, that she loved him and that their affair would last for all eternity.
Re-reading the letter in 2014, Brinkley-Rogers started sobbing. He wished he could thank her for all she taught him, and tell her his writing enjoyed the success she predicted.
Yukiko would be in her late 80s now, if she is still alive. Having thrown away the envelopes in which she sent her letters, her sailor boy did not have her full name and so could not trace her.
But at the end of his book, he invites her to meet him for one last coffee at their favourite cafe.