Review | Book review: remembering a lost love more than 50 years later
Englishman Paul Brinkley-Rogers was a teenage sailor in 1950s Japan when he met and lost the woman he has come to realise was the love of his life
By Paul Brinkley-Rogers
Touchstone
If this were a movie, the soundtrack would take the form of enka (cry-in-your-sake ballads sung about broken hearts). A “pure” romance, the tale centres on the platonic love affair between a young Englishman, Paul Brinkley-Rogers, and an older Japanese hostess in the late 1950s. He’s a teenage sailor with the USS Shangri-La when he meets cultured, 31-year-old Yukiko in a bar in the port of Yokosuka. It is her “duty”, she says, to educate him in poetry and opera. Thus begins a promisingly steamy relationship that ends with little but a wet hanky several months later when she reveals, in a note left on the eve of his departure from Japan, that she loves the young writer. Before that we witness her attempted suicide (after the death of her only child), delve into her murky past (yakuza are involved) and learn about not only Manchuria (where she was born) but also Suzy Wong-era Hong Kong, a regular port of call for the author. Septuagenarian Brinkley-Rogers reproduces the letters he received from Yukiko after their parting, hoping to be reunited with the woman he realised too late was the love of his life.