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Show 154 CHAPTER I Like Samarkand or Persepolis, Sid thought, Kyoto shoulri'nt be a real place: no reality matched a legend. In the legend there were emperors, samurai, court ladies gliding through shadowy corridors, in reality (he looked out the train window) a jumble of dark unpainted houses and stained angular buildings. Rut the other was there: high over the heads of the people, shuffling along in the bright sunshine, hung the unexorcized past. It lay behind a veil, so close that the slightest in-arivertencs -- a corner turned, a door cracked -- might reveal Genji among his ladies, the brocade glinting scarlet in the shimmer of lights. Oji too had a past, and in any Japanese history Sid ran across its name connected with feudal skirmishes, vendettas or piracy. Once it had been the canter of the Great Oji War, a swashbuckling affair of abducted princesses, suicide-pacts, stormed castles and infinite treachery. Rut now nobody seemsri to care; it meant no more than Levitown. The Army cared little about the past. It had come from Waco or Wauwatosa, and enjoyed the past (even its own) in rationed quantities only: a short tour, perhaps, after which it got back to drink and gossip. The three P's: pussy, promotion and (when there was one) the progress of the war. One could discuss these matters anywhere, but the drinks were better in Kyoto. Oji had no bars, or none an officer could enter without subterfuge, |