Read Dreaming Spies for Free Online Page B

admonition, and repeated the syllables, with a small difference: Korē wa ocha des’; sorē wa ocha de wa nai des’: This is tea; that is not tea. Our lessons had begun.
    That first morning we learned a nice collection of nouns and a few key constructions: This is … Where is …? I am … She had clearly already decided that, given the few days at our disposal, we should concentrate on the spoken word rather than attempt a conquest of the writing.
    One tends to think of Japanese women as timid, even submissive, but Miss Sato disabused me of that notion in no time. Once convinced that we were in fact interested in both language and customs, she assumed the rôle of a merciless instructor.
    Only later did it occur to me that this was the first time I’d actually watched Holmes devour an extended course of information. To be honest, I had to stretch myself to the utmost to keep up with him—whoever coined the phrase about old dogs and new tricks never watched Sherlock Holmes truly apply himself. That first morning, the gears of my brain were on the verge of slipping when came a fortuitous interruption. The library door banged open and in crowded a herd of young men, nervously eyeing the books on the wall, loudly greeting Miss Sato: two Brits, three Yanks, and the matched pair of Aussies—Thomas Darley not among them. One of the Americans asked the steward if he had read all those books. The man smiled politely, and didn’t bother rising from behind his desk to help them.
    There were only seven, but with the collective mass of several more. Three of them looked like football players (American football) and two like amateur boxers with their noses still intact. None was older than twenty-three, thus a shade younger than I, and they tumbled across the room like a litter of alarmingly oversized puppies.
    “Howdy, Haruki,” said Clifford Adair, clearly the self-appointed wit of the group. “Class starting?”
    “You have missed the first lesson,” she told him, friendly but firm. “Mr and Mrs Russell already have their vocabulary assignments.”
    “Yeah, well, about that. We were talking, the guys and me, and we thought maybe you could just give us some tips about the other things. Like, the food and the … the baths and things.”
    “Japanese customs, not Japanese language?”
    “Sure. The kinds of things that, you know, might keep us from putting a foot wrong when we get there.”
    It was a surprisingly sensible request. I was relieved when he went on to explain where it had come from.
    “Me and Ed here, we were talking to the purser about maybe spending a few days seeing your country, but we’ve heard, well, you do things pretty different there. And we’re willing to give it a go, but the more we hear, the more it seems that we ought to learn the playbook first. The rules, you get it? One of the old guys at dinner last night, he was sayingwhat an almighty uproar there was in his hotel when he took his bar of soap into the bath-tub and started scrubbing his back. Ended up having to pay a fine—well, not a fine exactly, but an apology, even though it seemed to him that’s what a bath was for. So anyway, the purser said we should talk to you, and we were wondering if you could maybe give us a few, well, lessons, like, on what to eat and how to take a bath and—”
    “And taking off your shoes!” Edward Blankenship contributed.
    “—and that. And, and … bars and stuff.”
    “Bars?”
    I bent to murmur into Miss Sato’s ear. She looked up at the young giant in surprise. “Do you mean geisha house?”
    All seven males turned bright red and examined their fingernails. She managed to keep control of her mouth, and nodded solemnly. “I see.”
    The purser’s suggestion had no doubt been twofold: he not only wished to provide a service (indeed, his income went up when his passengers were kept satisfied), but pursers and stewards were always looking for some means of keeping boredom at bay for the