Dragon Dance Read online

  ALSO BY PETER TASKER

  fiction

  Silent Thunder (1992)

  Buddha Kiss (1997)

  Samurai Boogie (1999)

  non-fiction

  Inside Japan (1987)

  KODANSHA INTERNATIONAL

  Tokyo • New York • London

  FOR FELIX

  Distributed in the United States by Kodansha America, Inc., 575 Lexington

  Avenue, New York, NY 10022, and in the United Kingdom and continental

  Europe by Kodansha Europe Ltd., 95 Aldwych, London WC2B 4JF. Published

  by Kodansha International Ltd., 17-14 Otowa 1-chome, Bunkyo-ku,

  Tokyo 112-8652, and by Kodansha America, Inc.

  Copyright © 2002 by Peter Tasker.

  All rights reserved. Printed in Japan.

  ISBN 4-7700-2948-9

  First edition, 2002

  02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tasker, Peter

  Dragon dance / Peter Tasker.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 4770029489

  1. Women journalists—Fiction. 2. Political parties—Fiction.

  3. International relations—Fiction. 4. Tokyo (Japan)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6070.A65 D7 2003

  823’.914—dc21

  2002030175

  www.thejapanpage.com

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  EPILOGUE

  About the e-Book

  PROLOGUE

  BEIJING 1996

  In a dull, featureless room in a dull, featureless building in Zhongnanhai, the heavily guarded area of Beijing that is home to the Communist party elite, two men sat facing each other across a table. They had been waiting half an hour already, and neither of them had said a word. The surface of the table was cold and black and gleamed like a mirror.

  Peng Yuan watched the other man out of the corner of his eye. He wondered who he was and why he had been chosen and whether he could be trusted.

  Not long ago, attending a meeting like this would have meant risking your life. Now he was only risking his career, apartment, pension, party membership, everything that made life bearable. That was why he chose to remain silent. You could never be sure of people you didn’t know well. In fact you couldn’t always be sure of people you did know well. You couldn’t always be sure of yourself.

  Peng Yuan had been a Red Guard in the 1960s. He had been among the thousands who had congregated in Tienanmen Square, waving their red books and chanting adulation to Chairman Mao. He had seen loyal party workers, men and women who had dedicated their lives to the Chinese people, dragged from their offices and beaten to death on the street. He had played his part, screaming abuse at the “drowning dogs,” rejoicing as the “red fountains” gushed into the air. He had acted as a man lost in a crazy nightmare. In those days the whole of China had been lost in a crazy nightmare. Nobody could be certain that the nightmare would not happen again someday.

  The door at the end of the room slid open, and a shrunken figure in a wheelchair glided over to the table, his head nodding in a metal brace. Another man came in behind him, but Peng Yuan’s eyes were fixed on the old man in the wheelchair.

  [6] For the first time in his life, Peng Yuan was in the presence of one of the great heroes of the Chinese nation. The drive against the Japanese in the winter of 1943, the smashing of Chiang’s nationalists at Tianjin in 1947, the brilliant surprise assault on the Americans in Korea—these were glorious deeds that had been replayed over and over again in movies and novels, and drummed into the heads of every schoolchild in the country. Peng Yuan could hardly believe they were breathing the same air. And yet this living legend had summoned him, Peng Yuan, to a secret meeting. At first he had thought it was a joke, or a trap set by his enemies at the institute. But being here today was no joke. It was the riskiest thing he had ever done.

  Disappointingly the old general looked nothing like the handsome figure in the movie posters. He was much smaller and frailer than Peng Yuan had expected. Strangely enough, though, the man in uniform behind the wheelchair did resemble the general in the old pictures. Then Peng Yuan realized that the younger man must be the general’s son—a senior general himself and the leader of a powerful military clique that controlled a network of arms factories, import-export monopolies, and overseas investment funds.

  Peng Yuan stood up to introduce himself.

  “I am Peng Yuan, research officer at the Institute of Foreign Relations.”

  The younger man signaled that he should sit down again.

  “Comrade Peng Yuan is too modest,” he said, leaning over his father’s wheelchair. “Two years ago he was the deputy director of the institute itself, and widely recognized as one of the finest young scholars in his field. Then suddenly he was demoted to a position unworthy of his talents.”

  Peng Yuan smiled weakly. “Young scholar” hardly fitted him these days, though compared to the man in the wheelchair even old Deng Xiaoping was a spring chicken.

  “Comrade Peng Yuan, please explain the circumstances of your unfortunate position.”

  Peng Yuan spoke slowly, haltingly. It was still painful to recall what had happened—all the lies and treachery, the anonymous attacks on his character, the gradual removal of his privileges.

  The general’s son nodded sympathetically. “And what made you so unpopular with the senior ideologues at the institute?”

  “My critique of evolutionism, naturally. It was a direct challenge to China’s current geopolitical strategy and all the vested interests that support it. My enemies were unable to undermine my theoretical work, so they decided to undermine me instead.”

  The old man frowned. He had the face of a mournful tortoise, gray and wizened.

  “Evolutionism?” he rasped in the desiccated whisper that was all that [7] remained of his voice. “That is an intellectual word that tells me nothing! You must learn to use plainer words.”

  “I’m sorry. I will try to speak more clearly.”

  “Go on!”

  “What I mean by evolutionism is the current optimistic tendency in geopolitical thinking. It maintains that changes in the relative power of nations automatically lead to changes in the structure of relations between them.”

  The old man’s frown deepened. Peng Yuan gave a nervous cough and pressed on.

  “To be more specific—the international system nowadays is hostile to China’s emergence as a great power, seeking to constrain us at every turn through military alliances and ideological assaults concerning human rights, environmental issues, and other such hypocrisies. The evolutionists believe that as China becomes richer and stronger, the international system will develop in a way more favorable to our interests. All we Chinese need to do is to be patient and make money and ingratiate ourselves with the foreigners.”

  The old general raised a shaky finger in the air. The skin was mottled by eight decades of heavy nicotine use. “And you don’t accept this?”

  Peng Yuan’s heart swelled with pride. “I have exposed it as a complete fantasy.”

  He went on to describe, in as simple
terms as possible, his computer simulation of relations between China, Taiwan, the US, and Japan. It was the most advanced model of its type, combining the latest developments in game theory with the classic principles of Chinese military strategy. The results were so sensational that no one had yet dared to publish them.

  Using this model, Peng Yuan had shown that the US-Japan alliance was an insurmountable barrier to China’s long-term strategic goals. Despite all the economic leverage China could exert on the United States and Japan separately, despite all the resources that might be expended in playing one off against the other, the chances of the alliance falling apart naturally were close to zero. It was too beneficial to both sides, and as China’s influence grew the benefits would only increase. Rather than weakening the alliance, China’s rise would actually strengthen it!

  The implications were shattering. It didn’t matter how much time passed. It didn’t matter how long the Chinese people waited or what further humiliations they endured. As long as the alliance remained intact, China would remain impotent. Unification with Taiwan, the dream of every Chinese leader since the revolution, would never happen. And without supremacy in Asia, the long-term goal of challenging America’s global hegemony was nothing but a pipe dream.

  When Peng Yuan had finished speaking, the old general sat staring at the [8] wall, apparently lost in thought. His skin was slack and gray, but his eyes were bright. Those eyes, thought Peng Yuan, had seen great things—from the Long March, when the general had been a dashing young revolutionary, to the launch of China’s first long-range ballistic missile. He was one of the few heroes to emerge unscathed from the turmoil of the 1960s and the wrenching changes of the 1970s and 1980s. Time and time again Deng’s reformists had attempted to marginalize him, but his power base amongst the military had proved too strong. Now, at the close of his life, he symbolized opposition to the slow poison of democracy and the invasion of decadent Western thought.

  The general’s son broke the silence. “And what if the Japan-US alliance were to collapse? What would happen then?”

  Peng Yuan hesitated before answering. That kind of jump in logic was outside his area of expertise. “Well, in that case the world would be a completely different place. Anything could happen.”

  “Thank you, Comrade Peng Yuan. Now let us hear a less theoretical approach to the subject.”

  The man sitting opposite Peng Yuan stood up and saluted.

  “I am Zhu Gao,” he said in a strong Shanghai accent. “I am deputy professor at the Central Military Academy. My specialty is Japanese security policy.”

  Peng Yuan leaned back in his chair, glowing with self-satisfaction. At last his ideas were being taken seriously. At last there was a chance they would be put into practice.

  ONE

  YOKOHAMA 2006

  The music was so loud that Jackson could hardly think straight. It was some kind of Japanese techno-boogie, with a guy screaming out the words like his ass was on fire.

  Davis leaned back against the bar, fingers in his belt, trying to look like some big-city gangster when in reality he was just an eighteen-year-old country boy, no different from Jackson.

  “Hey, Kong, I think I like this place already.”

  Jackson said nothing, took a pull on his beer bottle. He didn’t like being called Kong. It made him feel like a freak. Still, Davis was his best friend on the ship, his only friend really.

  “These Japanese bitches are hot, man. Even you gonna get your dick wet tonight.”

  Davis was gazing over at the dance floor, where half a dozen women in hot pants and halter tops were freaking to the rhythm. The beat was pounding away like a sledgehammer. It vibrated Jackson’s guts and rattled his bones.

  Hooper stuck his head between Davis and Jackson, his eyes mock-solemn like some TV comic.

  “Don’t know if them girls be capable of accommodating a man of the Kong’s dimensions. Maybe they gonna demand risk money.”

  Davis gave a yuk-yuk laugh. Jackson looked away. This kind of dirty talk made him uneasy. His mother had never allowed it, not from him nor from any of his brothers.

  “You think they’re ho’s?”

  “No, Kong, they trainee nuns.”

  This got a high-pitched giggle from Davis. He was all cranked up on some powder he’d bought at the base, but Jackson stuck to beer, as he always did. [10] And being the size he was, getting drunk was a financial impossibility.

  “Hey, lookee here,” said Hooper, nodding over at the entrance. A group of white sailors had just come in and were staring at the dance floor with big, stupid grins on their faces. One of them, a skinhead called Oakley, was bellowing something at the top of his voice, his eyes squeezed shut with the effort, his mouth a great wet hole. You couldn’t hear a word he was saying, but you knew it had to be obscene. Oakley couldn’t tell you the time of day without making it filthy.

  “Let’s go get some sushi, before it walk out the door.”

  Davis sauntered over to the dance floor, using the slow rolling gait that he figured made him look cool and mean. In fact he looked more like Mickey Mouse’s doggy friend.

  “Come on, Kong—it’s sookie-sookie time.”

  “Not for me, man. You go ahead.”

  Hooper shook his head in disgust. “What’s the matter? You think Jesus won’t love you no more?”

  Jackson said nothing. He still prayed every night before going to sleep, and for some reason Hooper thought that was funny.

  Jackson stayed at the bar, ordered another beer, and drank it as the white guys walked past pretending not to see him. Davis stepped onto the dance floor, started going through his crazy-legs routine. Hooper’s approach was more basic: he just took one of the girls by the wrist, and pulled her toward the bar. She was yelling and shaking her head, but not resisting much. That was good. For all his funny guy act, Hooper had a mean temper, especially with women.

  The techno-boogie was getting louder and faster, seemed like it was shaking his brain loose. Jackson liked music, but not this crazy stuff. What he liked was the kind that made him feel calm and strong, like the sound of the trumpet, soaring high and pure. He remembered the way his daddy used to play the trumpet in the yard, any song he heard on the radio he could just pick up that trumpet and play it straight off. After his daddy went away, Jackson had never heard trumpet-playing like that again.

  “What’s the matter, big guy? You look lonesome.”

  Jackson turned around. A woman was standing beside him, smiling as if she knew him. She had frizzed-out hair and wasn’t wearing a halter top or a micro-mini or hot pants, but was dressed normally, in jeans and a white T-shirt. And she was a great looker, in a witchy kind of way. She had high cheekbones and catlike eyes that caught your gaze and held on, made it difficult to look away again.

  “You from the big ship—right?”

  “How come you know that?”

  “You look like you been—on the water too long.”

  [11] Most women Jackson had met were scared of him at first. When they realized he wasn’t so scary, they laughed. But this woman wasn’t scared at all.

  “It’s plenty of fun—on that big ship?”

  “Ain’t fun exactly, but I kinda like it.”

  “Yeah? Why you like it so much?”

  Jackson paused to consider. It was a serious question, and it deserved a serious answer.

  “Well, it’s kind of hard to explain. This ship, it’s doing important work, defending regional security and stuff. That’s a big responsibility, gives you something to think about when you wake up in the morning.”

  “Hey, you sounding like—such a heavy guy!” She had a strange way of speaking English, fast and slurred, but with sudden pauses as if she’d forgotten how the sentence was supposed to end.

  Jackson frowned. “Miss, this is a heavy time for the world. Everywhere you look democratic values are under threat.”

  Jackson always tried to keep himself informed. He didn’t read so well, but he watched the new
s programs carefully. Davis and the others chuckled when he started talking about the Indonesian crisis or the Middle East peace conference. But the state of the world was no laughing matter. That was why they were all here.

  “This your first time—off base?”

  “Yeah, we got in a couple days back.”

  The first night there had been a curfew because of the big anti-US demonstration. Jackson had watched the flotilla of tiny boats bobbing around the shoreline and the noisy crowds surging along the street, the Buddhist priests chanting and banging drums. It had looked harmless enough, but apparently there had been trouble afterward. Cars had been trashed, and a couple of the base workers beaten with steel pipes.

  She was staring at him, her eyes as hard and bright as a cat’s. “So—how you like Japan?”

  “Ain’t seen much of it yet.”

  She nodded. “Then I gonna show you. Got some friends—having a party—just round the corner.”

  “Huh?”

  “Come, I show you—real Japan.”

  Jackson looked around. Strobe lights were sweeping the dance floor, breaking up the women’s bodies into a collage of flashing images—arms thrown in the air, frizzy hair across pouting lips, a jeweled navel, shiny thighs, nipples straining against thin cotton. Oakley and the other white guys were standing at the edge of the floor, grinning and gawking and swigging beer. Hooper and Davis were nowhere to be seen. They must have chosen their women and [12] gone, abandoning him to the loud music and this weird woman.

  “Let’s go, big guy.”

  Jackson stared down at her. She had about a third of his body mass, and her eyes were level with his chest, yet somehow he didn’t have the power to refuse. Those big black eyes were locked on to him.

  “Okay,” he muttered.

  She looped her arm around his and they walked toward the entrance. Oakley and his friends didn’t even look up, neither did the barman. Jackson stared at the ground, said nothing. He felt guilty, although what about he wasn’t exactly sure.