5.(0-1) Slim Novel 5 Start/Chap. 1 - New Decade, 1941

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Slim Novel 5
New Decade – 1941

Other Slim Novels

#1 Kimi // #2 Ali & Kimura – World’s Fair 1939

#3 Educating Kimi // #4 Olga & Boris – Honeymoon in Siberia

#6 Midway // #7 Tokyo at War – 1942/43

#8 Guadalcanal // #9 Kimi Heads North

#10 Losing War – Tojo Resigns // #11 New Future // #12 On the Ground Running // #13 Back in the Bronx // #14 Eddie in Occupied Japan//
#15 Eddie in Medical School// #I6 Eddie Around the World// #17 Wisdom of a Very Old Man

Summary of What Has Gone Before

Kimi was introduced in Slim Novel 1 as North Island fisherman’s daughter sent to entertainer training school. Her school fee is sponsored by Japan’s Imperial Army which in the 1930s is enlisting poor girls for service as Comfort Women for the troops. She serves the Army in Manchukuo and her contract is bought out by a White Russian, Ivan Vronsky for his nightclub. She becomes friendly with Vronsky’s Eurasian daughter Olga who sings at the club; also gets educated by clients who include Army officers, news reporters, and foreign tourists. A rising star Japanese foreign correspondent, Kimura, takes her under wing.

   Vronsky moves to Tokyo with Olga singing and Kimi his top tart and there Kimi meets Harumi, rich business man’s daughter, a communist.

Kimi also falls for an American, Tommy, and leaves work to shack up with him at a Little Pink House they rent in the Shibuya section of Tokyo. Tommy organizes a series of Seminars and we read of it all in Slim Novel 3, Meanwhile, in Slim Novel 4, Olga and Boris take a Honeymoon in Siberia. Then, “Educating Kimi”. Slim novel 5, here, is a follow up to that.

Chapter 1: New Decade

After 2 years of Tommy’s teaching, Kimi is blooming but still has rough spots and gaps. She has not yet got her own ideas and does not understand all of Tommy’s ideas but she is not contra. She speaks English at home and reads literature with help of dictionary. In 1940, it is unwise for Japanese to show interest in English, coming to be called teki no kotoba (the Enemy’s language).
   Olga marries the Soviet diplomat Boris but, after return to Tokyo, Boris is recalled to Moscow. Their marriage is all she hoped for - a Soviet passport ending statelessness; a job at the Soviet Embassy; and a man she admires, trusts and lusts. That she does not accompany Boris to Moscow is understood by him: he respects her artistry and need for career and is not sentimental about his wife’s marriage role, being a modern Soviet man.
   Olga’s relationship with Harumi is deepening: it is the interesting attraction of opposites – a brittle, glamorous, apolitical, amoral White Russian-Japanese arf & arf * attracted to a plain, politically committed, upper class Japanese. It is not just the lesbian connection, which while Boris is in Tokyo is sublimated but now he is gone flares hotly, it is a deep liking based on curiosity about what makes opposites tick. With Boris’s leaving, Olga and Harumi rent a house in Mejiro an outlying district in northwest Tokyo. Harumi continues her work, in secret, for the Japan Communist Party, which in 1940 is outlawed.

   Kimura continues with the blonde American Ali, a relationship with no strings.

(* an East Coast American slang expression that comes from "half & half", slurred into the British cockney accent arf & arf and refers to a 50:50 mixed-race person like Olga)

8 AM, 1 January 1941, the Pink House upstairs bedroom: Kimi lies in the round French bed after a New Year’s Eve that started at the Pigeon Club where Olga was doing the year-end show with the Tokyo Jazz Trio.
   Kimi at the moment is experiencing a delicious wake-up and becomes aware of Tommy in bed beside her. She nudges him and he opens eyes.

   “Tommy, it is first day 1941 and here we be alone together.” Her speech is the not-quite-grammatical English Tommy is teaching her because of his prejudice against not-needed words and cliché phrases,

   “Hey, dream doll! A good night ain’t it? An’ I don’ mean New Year’s eve, my Eve! I’m talkin’ ‘bout us here makin’ whoopee and what goes with it. You had your friend in you, I hope?”

   “It is in, Tommy.” She is referring to the contraceptive friend also called diaphragm.

   “Doll, this is a special day. Can you guess?”

   “First day 1941?”

   “Well, yes but that’s not so special?”

   “I dunno? What special?”

   “First day of new decade – the 1940s.”

   “But it is 1941.”

  “ Just what the average boob in street would say! Think a minute, Miss K, about our system of years which we call Anno Domini or A.D. from Latin. ‘Year of the Lord.’ Well, it happened a Greek geek, Dionysius Exiguus, in what we now call A.D. 525, invented A.D. to settle a dispute over the correct way to find Easter. He calculated the exact date of Jesus’s alleged birth.”

   Kimi interrupts, scribbling in her memo. “What ‘alleged’?”

   “Tell ya laytah, alligator, with a smile, honeychile," quips Tommy. "This Greek geek was off in his calculation by three years but that never matters to believers. The date, he declared, was the starting day of a new era – the Christian Era – and its years should be prefaced A.D., The year of our Lord. But Mr. Exiguus said the first year of that era should be “A.D. year 1”, instead of what it should be in a serial counting system, “A.D. year 0”. This resulted in the present confused naming in the previous decade for the zero-year of what the tens digit indicates should be a new decade.”

   Kimi catches on: “Oh, so 1940 was last year of the 1930s decade?”

   “Ya got tit, Baby” Tommy says in his silly obscene turn of phrase, reaching out to caress Kimi’s left breast tip, an act she does not withdraw from. “Ergo, Baby, each new decade should start like January 1, 1941 in its units-one year.”
   Kimi frowns. “Tommy, I guess I am just one of your average boobs like Mister Mencken talk about.” She makes a puzzled face. “Or is it boobess? Despite your explanation it seems much more practical to call a year ending in zero like 1940 the start of the new decade.”

   “But Baby …”

   “Let me finish and stop calling me Baby and Doll. And stop grabbing the personal parts of my body that you also call boobs and like you just did! I am going to be 25 next birthday – and don’t forget that day! And I am Homo sapiens not ragamuffin Ruby for you to play with.” Kimi ends her unusual outburst by sticking tongue out at Tommy, and then, to show she is not as angry as she sounds, kisses him tenderly on lips and Tommy suddenly realizes that he might have created a Frankenstein feminist. To change the subject he kisses her gently and his tongue opens her lips and soon they are soul kissing and Kimi’s passion rises, especially from Tommy’s finger massaging her below.
   Well, let us leave our lovers in their round French bed dowsing their spat with spit, or should we better say, “with a warm moist sexual solution”.
 Read on for an unexpected visit. Click 5.2 Who Jew?/Anti Semitism in Pre War Japan