For Frieda
Fire Dreams
I may live on until
I long for this time
In which I am so unhappy,
And remember it fondly.
He is squatting in his room in the High City, an open book in one hand, the fingers of the other hand stretched towards the glazed blue belly of a brazier. The room is small, the old sewing room, only four and a half mats, and made even smaller by the clothes that hang from the beading along the walls, by the piled books, by the bedding still unrolled from the previous night, though it is already past seven o’clock and pitch dark outside, this last evening of the year.
It has been his room ever since he was sent to sleep there on his return from Uncle Kensuke’s after the Great Earthquake. The first room he ever slept in on his own and where, in his twenty-first year — the eleventh of the Showa Era — he wrote, between the February coup attempt and the end-of-the-summer cicadas, all the poems in Electric Dragonfly, a miraculous season, but one that has never returned . .
He sighs, withdraws the hand he was warming, turns the page of his book, transfers the book to the warmed hand and holds out the other to the charcoal. He is reading in French — not his beloved Rimbaud, but a tale by André Gide he read in Professor Komada’s class at Nihon — a strange romance he did not quite understand then, and which now, for entirely different reasons, he is failing to understand for a second time. For how is he to concentrate on the adventures of Gérard Lacase when so many other matters — matters that cannot simply be pushed aside — turn the words on the page into marks as meaningless as the light reflected in the panels of the drying-platform door beside him? So the young hero (who confesses to knowing nothing of life except through books) must set out again and again for the château of la Quartfourche while Yuji examines from every futile angle the latest and most pressing of his difficulties, the matter of his allowance, of its cessation, announced to him by Father in the garden study three days ago, no warning, no warming up, everything delivered in a kind of distracted aside, Yuji by the door, Father at his writing table, smoking and peering at the end of a bookshelf . . Apparently, the allowance had become a burden on the household economy. There was a need to make changes, to curtail expenses. It was the new circumstances, etc. An unfortunate but necessary measure, though at twenty-five he was surely old enough, etc. He was thanked for his understanding. It was understood, of course, that he understood.
‘With immediate effect?’
‘From the New Year.’
‘Ah.’
So now he must find ways of making up the difference, the difference being almost everything. He will have to rely on people like old Horikawa, on Hideo Makiyama, a future of hackwork like the copy he wrote in November for the West Japan Shipping Corporation. (The newest ships! The fastest routes! Niigata docks are truly a gateway to the world!) Is this how a life goes wrong? How ambition is cut off and talent thwarted, so the fishmonger can be paid?
In the street below, too narrow for much in the way of traffic, a car is creeping towards the house. It stops beneath his window. A minute later the front entrance slides open and a voice, the sort that might emerge from the throat of a speaking bear, calls, ‘Is this a house of ghosts? Where are you all?’
Yuji drops the book onto his bedding, shrugs off the blanket he has been wearing round his shoulders, stands and descends — careful on the polished wood — the steep, unlit L of the stairs.
‘Grandfather!’
‘Grandson!’
Yuji bows. Miyo takes the old man’s cape. It’s almost too heavy for her, like some huge, dark moth she has captured. Under the cape, Grandfather is wearing a kimono of slate-blue silk, an inch or two of saffron at the sleeves. Father comes in from the study. He greets Grandfather — an exchange of the slightest, most stubborn nods — then the three of them go through the Western room to the Japanese room, where, with Grandfather in the honour place, the alcove behind him, they settle onto sitting cushions. The brazier here is the largest in the house yet seems to warm only the tips of their noses, their knees and fingertips. For most of the winter the room is unused, but the Western room, with its comfortable furniture, its electric heater, would not be quite proper at New Year.
‘A good trip over?’ asks Father.
‘A driver I’ve had before. He knows his way around.’
‘He’ll collect you later? You know you are welcome to stay . .’
‘These days I prefer to wake in my own house.’
‘Mmm. I understand. And how is your health?’
‘Better than yours, I expect. Books will cripple a man faster than digging in his garden ever will. Look at you. You can’t even sit with a straight back.’
‘Well, I shall have more time for the garden now.’
‘And Noriko?’
‘Noriko?’
‘She’s joining us?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘No? A pity.’
‘Yes. A pity.’
Grandfather frowns. Father frowns and stares at the matting. On each visit the same question about Mother. On each visit the same reply. A ritual neither seems able to abandon.
The front entrance again. A voice calling its greeting.
‘That’ll be Kushida,’ says Father, standing and going to receive him.
Yuji, left alone with Grandfather, wonders if there might be some way of hinting at the matter of his allowance, of its cessation etc, the difficulty it will cause, the sheer unfairness of it, but the old man, with his wide, wind-burnt face, looks as if he is stirring an enjoyable anger somewhere in his depths. It is not perhaps the moment.
‘You haven’t been out to see me for a while,’ says Grandfather.
‘Please excuse me . . I’ve been meaning to.’
‘I’ve made some interesting additions to the model.’
‘Yes? I’ll come soon.’
‘You should. I’ll be dead one of these days, you know.’
Father leads Dr Kushida into the room. The doctor is chaffing his hands. ‘The snow at last,’ he says, bowing to Grandfather. ‘Started just as I was passing the botanical gardens. One minute nothing, the next . .’
‘I could smell it as I set out,’ says Grandfather. ‘Like iron.’
Miyo brings in a tray of red and gold cups, red and gold flasks, the festival set. Father and the doctor light cigarettes. Yuji coughs. The scroll in the alcove is a Chinese painting of two figures with packs on their backs labouring up a hill where the pine trees are bent almost double by the weight of the snow. On the shelves beside the alcove is Father’s collection of antique incense burners.
‘I have a new patient at the clinic,’ says the doctor, combing his moustache with the tips of his fingers. ‘Came in at the beginning of the week. Name of Amano. He was’ — turning to Father — ‘at Imperial the same time as us or, at least, there was an overlap — 1911, I think.’
‘Is his case serious?’ asks Father.
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Mmm.’
For several minutes they discuss him, this Amano, or someone who, in 1911, might have been Amano. Was he in the rowing team? Was he the one whose elder brother died of blowfish poisoning? Or was that Maruyama?
Grandfather holds out his cup for Miyo to fill. He stares impassively through the smoky air. He does not think highly of the doctor, once describing him — to Father! — as having the looks of a Meiji petty bureaucrat, the type he’d had to deal with at the mayor’s office in the days he was selling his transport interests to the city. And what can ‘university talk’ mean to one who was earning his rice in the wards of the Low City by the time he was twelve? The life at Imperial, the high ideas and the in-fighting, must be as strange to him as the dancing of cranes.
Haruyo appears, informs them the bath is ready. As their guest, Kushida has the fresh water, then Grandfather, Father, Yuji and finally — as Mother and Haruyo bathed in the morning — the little serving girl, Miyo. The bathroom is on the ground floor, opposite the panelled wall of the stairs where the telephone (one of three private lines in the street) is mounted. At one time the water was heated with coal, but five years ago, when everything in Father’s world suggested only serene progress towards an honourable retirement, a new system was installed to heat the water electrically, a method everyone praised as clean and modern (and long overdue) but that has somehow never worked as well as the coal.
Crouching in the tepid steam, Yuji washes at the bucket, then lowers himself into the water on thin white arms. The bath is a wooden oval bound with hoops of steel, a little land-locked boat. Whenever Kushida bathes at the house, whenever Yuji has to use his water, he is sure he can smell Lysol disinfectant in the steam, just as he is sure he can smell it on his clothes for several hours after he has been up to the clinic to collect Mother’s drugs. He rests his chin on the tension of the water and finds himself thinking of Amano, of poor Amano in his metal-frame bed listening to the horns of the New Year traffic, to the nurses scuffing along the polished corridors in their paper shoes. It was Monsieur Feneon, one French Club night at his house in Kanda — the discussion taking an unusually serious turn — who said that while everyone understood that everyone must die, no one was able to imagine his own death. Imagination, he told them, baulked at that. But could this be true of Amano now? Must he not, as gravely ill as the doctor suggested, imagine his own end constantly? And what does he picture? His wife and children standing around him weeping or bored, and then, at last, the white cloth, which someone has been carrying carefully folded for just this purpose, floating down to cover his face? Or is he beyond anything so obvious, so literal, and sees instead his death figured in a sequence of memory, something mysteriously retained and played like ten frames of film in a relentless loop against the inner skin of his eyelids?
Yuji slides beneath the water, lies there in a foetal hunch. Because his chest is weak, he cannot hold his breath for long. He listens to the world played through the water, to the muffled drumming of his heart. A poet, even one who has not written in almost two years (who poetry has abandoned as mysteriously, as abruptly, as it arrived), has a duty to imagine what imagination baulks at, but the best he can achieve before the air in his lungs starts to burn is something indistinct and swirling, a patch of brightness disappearing into the general dark, like a coin sinking to the bottom of a pond, or the moon through blown clouds, or a head, a face white as a mask, peering through smoke . .
He surfaces. Whoops for breath.
After the baths, more sake. Grandfather has brought with him a bottle tapped from the cask he receives each year from a business associate who retired up in Iwate. Miyo and Haruyo bring through trays of food — clear soup, steamed yellowtail, deep-fried tofu, pickles and rice. At half past eleven the dishes are cleared, and everyone, with the exception of Mother who goes nowhere, and Haruyo, who goes nowhere with her, prepares to leave for the shrine.
Of the men, only Grandfather is wearing a kimono. Father and the doctor are identical in suits, sack coats and homburgs. Yuji is in a woollen jacket, and a coat that looks, from a distance, as if it might be made of camel hair, like Monsieur Feneon’s. Miyo, thin as young bamboo, has on her usual kimono of dark blue stripes on grey, a black jacket, a grey shawl, colours appropriate to her station, and ones that will not offend those guardians, official and unofficial, of the new austerity, among whom Haruyo it seems now numbers herself, for she has already made the girl wipe off the smear of lipstick she had put on, and would have forced her to remove the comb from her hair, the tortoiseshell one with moonstones Mother gave her last summer for her fourteenth birthday, if Father had not spoken up for her. (‘No one will notice such a trifle.’)
In the front garden, those five yards between the porch and the street, the snow is already ankle-deep. It lies like laundry in the arms of the persimmon tree outside Mother’s window, and like a perfect scoop of sugar on the saddle of Yuji’s bicycle, which he has left propped against the fence. They gather in the street, adjust hats and scarves, put up their umbrellas. On the gate of the neighbouring house a lantern is burning beside the coil of sacred rope, and on the pavement below two sets of footprints are filling with fresh snow.
Grandfather gestures to the flag that drifts and snaps from a nail in the pillar of the gate. ‘Is that a decoration,’ he asks, ‘or is the boy still away?’
‘Saburo?’ asks Yuji. ‘He’s not expected back for months.’
‘So the wife lives alone with the old woman? That can’t be much fun for her.’
‘Three more flags in this street alone since the fighting at Changsha,’ says Father. ‘Half the city must be over there by now.’
‘Well,’ says Kushida, buttoning a glove, ‘not every young man needs to worry about that.’ He glances at Yuji. Yuji bobs his head. Father mutters something. Grandfather grunts but says nothing. They start to walk.
Halfway to the shrine, they hear the first bell, the first deep note of the hundred and eight. Moments later the air is a solemn confusion of bell answering bell across the widths of the city.
A voice cries, ‘The Year of the Dragon!’ Neighbours flit past — Mr and Mrs Itaki, Kiyama the wedding photographer, the Ozonos. Then out of the veils of snow directly in front of them appears Father’s old assistant, Tozaburo Segoshi, with his wife and two gangling teenage daughters at his side, the same Segoshi who rose through the law department at Imperial by clinging to Father’s bootlaces, who has made a career for himself by filling out the margins of Father’s work. Seeing Father, he stops mid-stride, emits a mew of embarrassment, and hurries off at such a pace his women, hobbled by the tight skirts of their kimonos, can barely keep up with him. Even a year ago he would have stopped and bowed profoundly. He would have waited for Father to pass. He would have been honoured.
At the shrine, they join the back of the crowd and shuffle through the churned snow between big yellow lanterns. Ahead of them, muffled handclaps summon the kami. The snow is lighter now, and as the last flakes fall the air turns sweet with the steam from the hot sake the priests and shrine-virgins are ladling from cauldrons big as baths. Grandfather gives Miyo a pair of coins to make her offering and buy herself a trinket at one of the stalls lining the path. Yuji waits, considering whether he too might be given something. And then the thought strikes him — if Father one day mused aloud, however obscurely, about the difficulty of managing without his salary from the university, of living on his savings, could it even have been Grandfather who suggested the allowance be scrapped?
He hangs back, slips away, climbs onto a stone by one of the vermilion gates and looks out over army caps and student caps, over shawls and scarves and the bright lacquer of women’s hair. He is hoping for a moment of casual good fortune, and that out of all this crowd he will spy Kyoko Kitamura, whose footprints were one of the sets leading through the snow from the neighbours’ gate. His plan — a plan that never varies — is to catch her attention without, at the same time, being discovered by the old woman. If he succeeds, then Kyoko, supposing she is in an indulgent mood (and why should she not be on New Year’s Eve?), might find some way to join him for a minute, perhaps share a baked sweet potato with him in the shadow of a camphor tree. But if the old woman sees him, then the game is up, and not out of any unusual zeal on her part to keep her grandson’s wife guarded, but because she cannot forgive Yuji for living a safe and idle life while Saburo, only child of her only son, risks everything. She has a photograph of Saburo, a big one she keeps beside the god-shelf and which, one morning, she invited Yuji to admire and be shamed by. A picture taken in a studio in Nanking, Saburo in a winter coat with fur collar (non-standard issue), his left shoulder turned to the camera to show off his acting corporal’s chevron. A handsome soldier, the sort schoolgirls develop squints knitting mittens for. And should something happen to him — a not unlikely prospect, as everyone knows the casualty lists are far longer than those names inscribed each year in the Yaskuni shrine — then it seems certain the old woman, in her grief, her rage, will denounce Yuji as a coward, accuse him in front of Itaki the tobacconist, Otaki the noodle-seller, Ozono the brush-maker, in front of the whole street. For what would restrain her? Is it not true that these days the Takano family can be insulted at will?
Someone is calling him. He turns, scans, sees at last, in the light of a kite stall, the Miyazaki brothers, Taro and Junzo, waving to him. He waves back, pushes through to them. They exchange their New Year greetings, first in their own tongue, then, more quietly, as fellow members of the club, in French.
‘Your people here?’ asks Taro.
‘Somewhere,’ says Yuji.
‘Ours too,’ says Taro. ‘Somewhere.’
‘Have you noticed,’ says Junzo, leaning and speaking in a stage whisper, ‘how the priests all look a bit Chinese this year? And there’s a definite smell of garlic about the place. Shouldn’t we, as respectable citizens, report them to the Tokko?’
Taro punches his brother’s shoulder. He’s grinning but there’s no amusement in his eyes. ‘Little brother’s had a few,’ he says.
Yuji nods, looks from one to the other — from Junzo, with his hair poking in tufts from under his student cap, a yellow scarf wound round his neck and trailing almost to the ground, to Taro, who, in his new hat, his new coat (a ministry pin on the lapel like a drop of spilt silver), is as neat as the menswear poster outside the Shirokiya department store. There’s a second of silence between them, then, as though to cover an unexpected awkwardness, they start, in hurried voices, to speak about the French Club’s year-forgetting party at the Feneons’, and laugh, all three genuinely amused this time, at the recollection of Junzo’s barking competition with Feneon’s pug, and how at the end of it, Alissa Feneon awarded Junzo the prize, a mock diploma torn from the back page of a newspaper, an advertisement — aimed, presumably, at the families of military men — for a kind of indestructable Rayon sock.
When the laughter stops, Yuji says, ‘I’ve had some bad news.’
‘Your father?’ begins Taro, cautiously.
‘No, no . .’
‘You mean,’ says Junzo, ‘someone’s given you a job?’
‘I mean I shall need to find one now.’
‘So, it’s the allowance,’ says Taro.
Yuji nods.
‘A cut?’
‘Worse.’
‘All of it?’
Yuji nods again, then finds, suddenly, he does not want to discuss the matter at all, that there’s a tightness in his throat, a bubble that threatens to swell into a sob. If he was to stand in front of the Miyazakis blubbing, the shame of it would burn for months . .
He is saved by drums, by lights. The priests and their assistants, illuminated by the brilliant-white cones of two searchlights, are processing up the steps of the hall of worship. Afterwards, the ‘Navy March’ is played through speakers slung from wires between the trees. The friends agree to meet at Watanabe’s bathhouse as soon as the holidays are over, then Yuji enters the crowd again, moves through its shifting labyrinth until Mrs Sakaguchi, mad for gossip about his embarrassing parents, tugs at his sleeve as he passes the purification trough. He backs away from her, apologising and bowing, then follows a side path out of the shrine precincts and onto the road to the cemetery.
He has given up the hunt for Kyoko (did he really expect to find her?) but is in no mood to be at home, sitting in the cold and perhaps having to listen to more reminiscences about the old days at Imperial. In a few minutes he is alone, walking through the lanes of a neighbourhood almost untouched by earthquake and fire — or as untouched as anywhere in this city of disasters. A secretive place where the mouth of an alley, a pair of wooden sandals propped on a verandah, the snow-covered slats of a dog-fence, float uncertainly in the light from tightly latticed windows. At night almost anyone can become lost in such a neighbourhood, but Yuji, preoccupied by an unhappiness almost indistinguishable from a certain type of boredom, navigates with an unconsidered sureness of step until a subtle chilling of the air warns him he is only a turn or two from the cemetery. He does not believe in ghosts and yet, somehow, this does not stop him from being afraid of them. He slows his pace, imagining them roused by drums and gongs, gathering at the cemetery gates (rustling together like the wings of insects) and waiting for some foolish young emissary of the living to pass close by.
And it is then, just as he is considering turning back towards the holiday crowds, that he sees two figures appear, palely, from the dark at the end of the street. He steps under the eaves of the nearest house, presses himself against the shutters, but already he can tell that the figures are men, not spirits, and pale only because, other than for loincloths and headbands, they are both naked. They are running, hopping over the snow, though their progress is pitifully slow. As they come closer, he hears their little yelps of pain and self-encouragement, and as they draw level with him, he sees how their skin glitters with ice like fish scales. Shrine runners. Middle-aged penitents hoping to earn a year of better luck by dousing themselves with buckets of bitter-cold water at every shrine they stagger into. Clenched teeth, clenched buttocks, they do not even glance at Yuji as they pass, though he is no longer hiding from them. If Junzo and Taro were with him, he might have found the scene absurd, would, perhaps, have slyly laughed, but on his own he simply watches them as they disappear into the bend of the street, stares after them, enviously, as if these men had found a form (forget how mad it looks) that answered whatever urgencies provoked them. If he was to strip now and bundle his clothes, would they object to him hopping over the snow at their backs? It would almost certainly kill him, but no one — not Father or even the old woman — would dare to call him frivolous. How amazed they would be to see him return to the shrine in nothing but his underwear! To hear him hollering to the kami as the well water broke over his head!
It’s two o’clock before he is in his own neighbourhood again, cold and hungry. He would like to warm himself with a bowl of steaming noodles, and wonders if Otaki, in festival humour, might still be open, but the shop is shut and shuttered, a tongue of snowless pavement outside where the dregs of the broth have been poured away. On the Kitamura Gate the flame is out. He watches a while, his ears stinging with the cold, then goes into his own house, slides the door and stands on the beaten earth of the vestibule listening for voices. A glow in the panel above the doors to Mother’s room is enough for him to see Father’s boots beside the vestibule step, and the shadow of Miyo asleep under her quilt on the mats at the bottom of the stairs, an arrow charm from the shrine next to her pillow.
He goes to the kitchen, eats a mouthful of congealing rice, washes it down with a cup of water. When he’s finished, he steps over Miyo and climbs towards his room. At the turn of the stairs, his toes touch the shaped hard edge of something, and though the turn is the darkest place he knows, as he reaches down, that it’s the old talisman of the seven gods that Mother leaves out — with her own hands or Haruyo’s — for him to slip beneath his bolster and so enter the New Year with propitious dreams of eagles, sacred mountains . .
He carries it to his room, pulls off his jacket and tie but nothing else, then gropes his way into the bedding, curls up and lies gazing at the blue snow-light in the glass of the drying-platform door. The shrine runners run through his head, feebly glittering figures always a step or two from disappearing into the night. In reverie they gain strange identities. Father and Dr Kushida. Junzo and Taro. Himself and Ryuichi. Himself and Saburo. Staggering over the snow, hopping over the snow . .
Then out of the small-hours hush he hears, faintly from some neighbouring house, the sound of piano music on a wireless. The Schumann piece, perhaps, everyone pretends to like so much. Then it ends, or the dial is turned, and something else begins, the simple notes of a koto playing a song he remembers from earliest boyhood, ‘The Boatman’s Song’, a sentimental, empty-headed little ditty, and to his own cold fingertips he starts to whisper the old words: ‘I am dead grass on the riverbank. You are dead grass too.’
Despite the seven gods his sleep is dreamless. He lies in to some unseemly hour (as young boys, he and Ryuichi were always up at dawn on New Year’s Day), and in the afternoon plays flower cards with Miyo in the Western room, now and then looking up to watch Father in the garden brushing snow from the delicate plants, unburdening them. Miyo, who excels at flower cards, wins fifty sen and insists on being paid immediately. He pays her, wondering if she has a little purse hidden somewhere, a purse of little coins, perhaps under the house.
At twilight he goes upstairs and onto the platform. With his back to one of the drying posts he gazes over snow-heaped roofs to where a red neon sign for Jintan Pills winks blearily from its gantry in the Low City. He likes sometimes to imagine it’s sending him a message, a warning, an invitation, something meaningful, but today it is simply, ‘Jintan Pills, Jintan Pills, Jintan Pills . .’
From the gardens he hears the collar bell of Kyoko’s cat. He leans over the parapet and sees its shadow spring from the fence and glide under the bare branches of the gingko tree. The animal is pregnant and seems to have made a nest for herself in the bamboo that grows in a screen round the garden privy. No way of knowing, of course, which of the local toms has been with her.
On the second day of the holiday he does what he calls his accounts. The reckoning is very simple. After paying Miyo, he has eleven yen and fifty sen left in the world. He owes two yen to Taro, one to Shozo and three at the noodle shop. This leaves the almost useless sum of five yen and fifty sen. On the credit side, there are ten yen owing to him for the Niigata Docks copy, another ten for translating, for the Fukuhara Toothpaste Company, a document entitled ‘Gingivite — Le Grand Défi de Notre Époque?’ The rest is all hope, ambition, speculation. No sign yet of any New Year gift money. No one decently to borrow from. Little chance of credit.
He turns over the paper and on the other side starts to make a list of people who might help him. He puts Grandfather at the top. Even if the old man was involved in the decision to stop the allowance — especially if he was involved — would he not agree to a small loan? There have been several in the past (some of them repaid). But with Grandfather there is always the difficulty of knowing what he has anymore, whether he has given all his money away to shrines (a new carved roof for the shrine at Mita, a god-car for the shrine at Kitazawa), to family spinsters in the country, to former employees on hard times, or whether it is still lying in bars of jade and bolts of silk in a fireproof godown somewhere by the river.
Horikawa (of Horikawa and Son, Horikawa Trading Inc., the Horikawa Talent Bureau) can usually be counted on, but only for scraps . .
And Makiyama? Whatever one thinks of him, whatever one cannot avoid thinking, it must be admitted he has the necessary connections. He took the John Ford essay last summer, placed it with Eastern Review, and might, if Yuji can find him sober, be persuaded to take something else, something on Fritz Lang, or the stories of Akutagawa, or even — why not? — on Arthur Rimbaud. For that he would need only the books that lie around in his room. He could write it in a week, in two days, though he would have to find some contemporary relevance, some angle to make a dead French poet enticing to a modern Japanese readership . .
There is a way, of course, a way he has thought of countless times. Monsieur Feneon must be persuaded to show him the letter, the one he mentioned (and so casually!) that spring afternoon in Professor Komada’s rooms, but which, in the years since, nobody in the club has succeeded in gaining so much as a glimpse of, all requests met with the same enigmatic smile, the same flutter of the hand. But a story based on the letter, an essay that linked the names of Rimbaud, Feneon and Yuji Takano, a literary detective story, a kind of séance, it could even make a news story, something for the human-interest pages in the Yomiuri, a respite from reports of battlefield sacrifice, or some village in Shikoku where they have vowed to give up sleep so they can plant more rice. With the letter in his hand, would he need Makiyama?
Out in the garden the crows are squabbling. In the Western room the clock is chiming the hour. He puts down his pen. Today, perhaps, he will see Mother. Today is one of the usual days, one of those appointed to such meetings. He combs his hair, goes downstairs to find Haruyo. She is in the kitchen squatting by the half-open door to the passage along the side of the house, a heavy shawl across her shoulders, her long-stemmed pipe in her mouth. Without looking at him, she says that Mother is too tired to see anyone, that she is resting. Resting? She nods. He wonders if she also forbids Father, this nurse-servant who has become Mother’s warder. He wonders, too, how a person can be tired when they do nothing, when they have done nothing for seventeen years, when every day they are resting, resting.
Back in his room, he picks up the little sheet of accounts, stares at it, then takes his fountain pen and writes across the bottom, in the neat, cursive script he first learnt at middle school, ‘Ô saisons, Ô château, quelle âme est sans défauts?’ Then he rips the page in two, drops the halves into the brazier. Black-ringed holes appear. Finally, a flame.
Early on the morning of the last day of the holiday, Uncle Kensuke rings. Yuji, still in bed, knows it must be Uncle calling because Father, who has answered the phone, is asking about the snow in the mountains. ‘Has there been much yet? Hmm. I see. That must be difficult for you . . Yes. Here too, a few inches.’
Sometimes Uncle Kensuke and Auntie Sawa come to Tokyo for the holiday, but this year they will not be coming until the Festival of Lanterns, the Festival of the Dead. Father asks about the children, Hiroshi and Asako, and Asako’s husband, who everyone says is doing so well with Mitsubishi. ‘And Sawa? Her back? Hmm.’
Now it’s Uncle’s turn to ask questions. ‘Oh, much the same,’ says Father, though Yuji cannot tell if he is speaking of himself or Mother, or everything. ‘This year will be better, perhaps. I might try my luck at a little farming, like you. I could buy some chickens, keep a pig.’ He laughs. ‘If we have food shortages, I can make my fortune.’
There is a long pause while Uncle speaks. He is the younger brother and not, therefore, not strictly, the one to be proffering advice to the head of the family, but Yuji hopes that is exactly what he is doing. If Father has the subtler brain, the one best suited to the play of abstracts, the framing of elegant questions, the exegesis of documents whose difficulty is like a glass surface thick as a fist, it’s Uncle Kensuke who has inherited Grandfather’s common sense.
‘Well,’ says Father, ‘well, we’ll see.’ Then he laughs the same unhappy laugh at what is evidently a question about Grandfather. ‘The model? Oh, yes, it still goes on, I believe.’
That night Yuji wakes out of a dream. Not one of the fire dreams — he’s been spared those for almost half a year — but some troubling dream whose details disperse in the instant of waking, leaving only an atmosphere, a sense of ominous approach, of struggle. And what comes to comfort him as he lies in the frigid small-hours stillness of his room is the memory of Uncle Kensuke’s farmhouse above Kyoto, and of Uncle himself, always more artist than farmer, hoisting sheets of silk and linen from the vats in the floor of the dyeing barn, where all through the cold season the indigo leaves lie steeping in a brew of wood ash and lime and sake. Men’s urine, too, if Hiroshi is to be believed.
It is so many years now since that summer — the invalid nephew sent to get clean air in his lungs, to become a proper boy with a boy’s vigour — it still surprises him how much he has kept of it, that it was not all swept from his mind the moment he returned to Tokyo and saw Father pushing through the tattered crowd at the station, ash on his shoes, ash on the cuffs of his trousers. Instead, it has survived, like something improbably fragile salvaged from the chaos of a ruined house, though time has coloured it with a thin wash, a binding glaze, so that the shadows under the pine trees and the smoke from the saucer of smouldering chrysanthemums, the black of Asako’s hair, the grey of storm clouds, are all faintly indigo now. Even the moon of that summer, westering over mountain villages and lonely farmhouses has, in memory, some blush of indigo, as if it, too, once hung dripping over the vats in the barn.
Two days later he rises from his bedding an hour before first light, breakfasts in the kitchen on a handful of yesterday’s rice, a mouthful of cold tea, then steps over the sleeping Miyo, puts on his boots, scarf and ‘peach-bloom’ trilby, slides the front door to the width of his shoulders, and posts himself, quietly as he can, into the dark of the front garden.
Most of the snow has melted but the air is cold as pond water colder now than when the snow was there. He hurries to the end of the street, pushes up the sleeve of his coat to check the luminous dial of his watch, then turns onto the main road, the north — south that runs in front of Imperial and on towards Kanda. When he has walked some two hundred yards, he stops and slowly retraces his steps. A one-yen taxi passes, a woman in the back, her powdered face lit for an instant by the flare of her cigarette. Then an old man goes by, hauling a white cow on a length of rope, muttering to it his complaints about the world while the beast pours steam through its nostrils. At last, coming towards him, he hears the quick scuff and tap of the footfall he has been listening for. A shadow appears, hesitates at the sight of him, then comes closer.
‘So it’s you, is it?’ Her breath touches his face. He nods, then tells her — with what he hopes is an appealing listlessness — that he has been out most of the night, walking and thinking.
‘Out drinking on the Ginza, you mean.’
‘I’m not one of those,’ he says. ‘In fact, I have a lot on my mind right now.’
This, she must know, is not unlikely (though whose mind these days does not carry its burden?). Her voice softens a little. ‘Even so,’ she says, ‘I don’t have time to talk to you now.’
‘You’re going to work?’ he asks, as if the idea has just occurred to him, though he could, if called on, write down her hours as accurately as any of her supervisors at the railway company. Kyoko Kitamura, reporting to Tokyo Central Station at six o’clock for the seven fifteen express to Shimonoseki. If he was to unbutton her winter coat, he would find beneath it the black dress and black stockings of her uniform. Her cap and apron — washed and starched — will be in the canvas bag over her shoulder, next, perhaps, to a lunch box, a pack of cigarettes, a magazine or two.
‘As we’ve run into each other,’ he says, wondering at how easily these half-lies come to him, if he should be troubled by such a facility, ‘why don’t I see you to the station? There’s no sense my trying to sleep now.’
At first she refuses, then seeing he will not be easily shaken off, and seeing too how well the darkness covers them, she agrees he can walk her the five hundred yards to the tram-stop. He talks to her about the New Year holiday, how nice it was, how boring. He tells her he looked for her at the shrine.
‘We didn’t stay for long,’ she says. ‘Grandmother’s chilblains are bad this winter. The cold is painful for her. I have to bind her feet at night.’
‘And Mr Kitamura? Did the New Year mail get through?’
There was, she says, a card with a printed New Year message, to which Saburo had added a line of his own.
‘A line? Well,’ says Yuji, ‘there can’t be much time out there for writing.’
‘There’s plenty of time,’ she says. ‘He’s just not the sort to write much.’ She doesn’t add ‘as you know’ or ‘you know how he is’, and again Yuji wonders what, and how much, Saburo has ever told her about the two of them. Would he have reminisced, with a bark of indulgent laughter, about his days at middle school, when it was Yuji, skinny little Yuji with no elder brother to protect him any more, who did much of his writing for him? Would he have recalled for her the fact that, though he was indeed expert at making water-bombs or cracking people over the head with a shinai, in calligraphy class he barely knew which end of the brush to hold? Has he, then, with a frown of amazement, tried to explain to her his long alliance with Yuji, a bond between two kinds of weakness, revived at the outset of each new term with a leisurely beating and certain simple though effective acts of humiliation, such as forcing open Yuji’s mouth and spitting into it. Or is it his task to explain to Kyoko that her husband — heroic young veteran of the Kwangtung Army — was, for some years, his private bully? Not, it should be said, that they ever truly hated each other, not then. On the contrary, they were drawn together by mutual loneliness, a precocious knowledge of loss (Saburo’s mother a victim of the influenza in Taisho 8, his father dead from cirrhosis of the liver the first year of Showa), so that even as one brought down his fist and the other grunted with pain, it was a type of friendship, and one that lasted, in its own mysterious fashion, until the marriage two years ago, or until that spring afternoon three weeks after the wedding when Yuji, outside Otaki’s, watched the couple returning to the old woman’s house arm in arm under the shade of a parasol, petals in Kyoko’s hair from blossom-viewing in the park, and on the groom’s face, a look of imbecilic happiness, even a kind of innocence, as if, five minutes earlier, he had suddenly imagined himself a man of boundless virtue, and immediately, without the slightest struggle or doubt, had started to believe it. It was then that Yuji should have rushed across the street and flung himself on Saburo’s back. When would he own such invincible rage again? Instead, he had watched them turn in at the old woman’s gate, heard the street mutter its approval of such a handsome pair, and without so much as a shrug retreated to his own house, climbed to the drying platform, and stared, an idiotic sneer on his face, across the fence to the neighbours’ garden.
To be forgotten by someone like Saburo Kitamura! To be thrown aside like a broken sandal so that the present moment could be enjoyed without the inconvenience of remembering anything as unpleasant as spitting into a boy’s mouth. It was an insult both painful and shaming. Also, perhaps, a judgement, a moment of revelation that exposed him, if only to himself, as the kind of man even thugs and dullards could leave behind them in their dust. .
At the tram-stop, a dozen men and women are huddled, half-asleep, in their coats. ‘Stay here,’ says Kyoko, peering to see who among them might recognise her. ‘That’s far enough. Go home.’
He does not wish to anger her — he’s seen her temper flash out more than once when he’s been slow to follow her direction. He lets her go, retreats a little, then crosses to the gateway of a school on the far side of the road, where he waits until the tram rattles into view, collects its load, and rattles off, its single headlamp throwing a limp yellow beam onto the track ahead.
She will be gone for two days, sleep most of the third, be back on shift by the fifth. Five trips a month, Tokyo to the deep south, waiting tables in a swaying box as the country flashes by the window (a glimpse of mountains, a glimpse of the sea, towns and cities half known, half anonymous).
Does Saburo approve, or is he just relieved not to have to send more money home? Even with his promotion, there won’t be much to spare after buying fur collars for himself and paying for studio portraits. The old woman takes in sewing, of course, in the season, but so do half the wives and widows in the city, there’s no money in it. It’s Kyoko who makes ends meet in that house, Kyoko with her cap and apron, her strong legs of a farmer’s daughter from Saitama Prefecture.
He leaves the gateway and turns for home, feeling something awkward, something more difficult than his usual sly pleasure in harming an absent enemy, the usual uncomplicated interest he takes in that tight, sturdy body under the winter coat. But it’s not until he’s passing the university library, where a lone light burns feebly against the brightening sky, that he realises he has started to respect her. It startles him. He cannot believe he ever really intended to fall in love with her, this wife of a man he has never stopped being frightened of. And yet how interesting it is, how poetic, to think that he might!
When Yuji arrives at the office — a rented room above a bicycle repair shop in the Hibiya district — Horikawa is sitting at his desk speaking on the telephone. He is also doing calculations on the sorobon, smoking a cigarette (Airship brand), picking at his breakfast rice, glancing at the racing pages of the paper and waggling a finger to welcome his visitor. His feet are hidden by the clutter under the desk but Yuji wonders if he might be doing other things with his toes, a little typing perhaps, some filing. No one else he has ever met can perform as many tasks simultaneously, and perform them well, for the calculations will all be correct, no rice will be spilt and the good horses will be sorted from the bad. So remarkable is this talent it’s generally agreed that he would, by now, have his own building in the Marunouchi were it not for certain bad stars that gave him a son, Yuji’s age, who staggers through the house moaning and drooling, a wife, a third the husband’s size, with a taste for brandy, and in his chest a swollen heart that now and then lingers between beats, so that — terrifying to those who have witnessed it — he sometimes halts mid-stride in the street, suspended between two worlds, the living and the dead.
He points to the bench by the door. Yuji sits. On the wall opposite the bench, a wall that on his last visit still had a framed photograph of Tokyo Central on it (a view from Nihombashi before the earthquake, the station’s dome and towers on the far side of the tracks that separated it from the Low City), there is now a map of Japan, like the ones they used to have at school. Red dots and red circles for the towns and cities, the country the colour of flypaper, the sea an unbroken blue. One of the pins holding the bottom of the map has fallen out and the paper has rolled upwards, giving the country a curled tail like a smoked fish. While Horikawa talks, and the wooden beads of the sorobon click, Yuji counts off the dots and circles he has been to outside of Tokyo: Kyoto and Nara on visits to Uncle Kensuke; Snowy Akita on trips to Grandfather Yakumo and Aunt Togashi, both long dead now; Yokohama — which hardly merits inclusion on such a list — to look at the foreigners, to look at the liners, to make (once) an outing to a certain place behind the docks, an afternoon he would prefer to forget about; and Kamakura, where on family holidays they used to rent a villa in the hills and spend two weeks of the summer, holidays whose heat and flavour are now just a clutch of mental postcards — Father on the beach with a towel round his head, reading a newspaper, Mother in a polka-dot swimsuit, Ryuichi eating watermelon, the juice running off his chin.
As for anywhere beyond the black lines marking the coasts of the islands, there is nothing. Father, at his age, or a little older, was preparing to set sail for Marseille, the beginning of a six-month tour of British and European universities — Mother, who now travels only to the bathroom or, on rare occasions, into the garden, lived a whole year in Korea when Grandfather Yakumo was teaching at the Christian college in Seoul. But for himself, he finds it hard to believe he will ever do more than add a red circle or two to his collection. And anyway, these days leaving Japan means leaving in a uniform on your way to China. .
When Horikawa puts down the telephone he pays Yuji out of the petty-cash tin, then lights the spirit burner in the corner of the room and makes them both some coffee. The morning is bright. Despite the cold, they sit at the open window watching trains cross the railway bridge. Horikawa knows them all, each engine’s destination, and points them out for Yuji with the tip of his cigarette, speaking of them as if they were old friends leaving for the country but whose return was promised.
To Yuji’s question about more work he answers with a grimace. The West Japan Shipping piece, he says, was well received. The vice president’s assistant had his secretary call to say how pleased they were. But business almost everywhere was slow. It was the time of year. It was the international situation. War was always good fortune for someone — a skilled worker in heavy industry could get all the overtime he wanted — but for others . . ‘Take your Monsieur Feneon, for example. Silk brokers like him can’t rely on the old markets any more. How much Japanese silk will there be on the catwalks of Paris this spring? These days—’ He stops, leans to the window. ‘Ah, engine two hundred and seventy-one. She’s for Nagoya. These days you need to know someone in the government. Someone who can hand out a nice fat contract. If I was in Feneon’s line, I’d go to the War Ministry and talk about parachutes.’
‘Parachutes?’
‘They’re made of silk, aren’t they? Even with our airmen’s indomitable spirit I expect they still like to take off with a parachute on their backs.’
Yuji, who has long wished to be of service to Feneon, to repay his many kindnesses and show that he is not only a loyal friend but someone whose thinking can have practical as well as merely intellectual outcomes, is immediately struck by the brilliance of the idea.
‘Should I suggest it?’ he asks. ‘Do you know someone who could help?’
‘I was . .’ says Horikawa widening his eyes, ‘. . . I mean, do you really think the government would employ a Frenchman to make parachutes for us?’ He starts to giggle. ‘We might, while we’re at it, ask the Americans to make our gun sights.’
‘But we’re not at war with France. Or with America for that matter.’
‘Well, it’s true . .’
‘And Monsieur Feneon’s been here for years! Everyone knows him. You know him. His daughter walks around in kimonos. She takes classes in classical dance.’
‘The lame girl?’ At this, Horikawa begins to wheeze. He presses a hand to his chest, then tugs from his jacket pocket a large handkerchief and carefully, starting at the brow and working down to his throat, wipes the shine from his face. Horikawa sweats winter and summer, an oozing that carries the not unpleasant smell of the preparations he takes for his heart, those bitter teas of roots and fungi harvested in remote mountain forests. ‘Perhaps she really thinks she is Japanese, but it will take more than kimonos and being able to dance Flowers of the Four Seasons to persuade the gentlemen at the ministry. But don’t worry. Feneon’s an old hand. He’ll use his contacts in Indochina. Move back into tobacco or rubber. He’ll know what to do.’
He asks Yuji to stay and play a game of shogi with him, but Yuji, who has not enjoyed being laughed at, invents a vague appointment, excuses himself, and leaves the office. In the repair shop below, the mechanic in his oil-grimed leggings is squatting on the floor with a bicycle wheel in his hands, holding it up like a type of old-fashioned sun-sight. He nods to Yuji, calls out a tradesman’s bright good morning. Yuji nods back, takes in, in a single glance, the cluttered workshop, and walks towards the palace moat thinking how hard it is not to become at last like everyone else, not to lose, as one grows older, all delicacy of response. Horikawa, for example, is a clever man, but he is too cynical, too interested in money, too sunk in the narrow ambitions of commerce. Feneon, of course, is also interested in money, but Feneon knows literature, knows art, while Horikawa knows — what? Trains, racehorses. Is that how you protect yourself? By reading? By listening to music? Or does the world exert an ineluctable force that only the most exceptional can resist? And is he one of them? Is he exceptional?
He stops by the bank of the moat opposite the boat-rental pier and looks down at his reflection, an outline that could be almost anyone’s. Between the drifting willow leaves, bubbles break the water’s surface. Something is down there, some bony fish or other, dull in its own dull kingdom. He turns away, and to protect himself a little from his own interest in money, to distract himself from the nagging fear he may not be quite as exceptional as he once believed, he conjures up the spirit of Arthur Rimbaud striding along a country road to Paris, crazy grey eyes, his pockets stuffed with paper, a poetry so pure everyone will either fall in love with him or want to murder him. .
At home, lunch is ground beef and grated yam. Father has carried his food out to the garden study to continue, undisturbed, his reading in those volumes of archaeology that are his new obsession. The Jomon Era, the Yayoi, the far edge of history. Cultures that have to be imagined from shell-mounds, fragments of terracotta. Yuji eats with Miyo in the Western room. After lunch she shows him a beauty magazine she has borrowed from one of the other serving girls in the neighbourhood. In an article called ‘Please Be Proud of Your Japanese Skin’ there is a character she cannot read. It is, he says, the character for ‘fate’ or ‘the path you are obliged to follow’ or ‘the unrefusable way’ or, to put it plainly, ‘the unavoidable’, ‘the inevitable’. Also, perhaps, ‘submission’. She thanks him, then hearing Haruyo slide open the door of Mother’s room, she hurriedly rolls the magazine and thrusts it inside her kimono, between her little breasts.
Rain, then sleet. Yuji hurries through the door of the bathhouse, stows his umbrella, picks at the knots in his laces, tugs off his boots, examines the fringes of wet sock where his boots have leaked, puts the boots into an open locker, and greets Mrs Watanabe, who bows and tells him that his friend, that nice young man, arrived ten minutes ago, something Yuji already knows, having just seen Taro’s leather brogues drying in the locker above his own.
In the next room, he strips, takes his towels and slides open the door to the baths. The bathhouse has been here since before the Great Earthquake (the boast is that they only closed for a week), a shadowy place, slightly shabby and not, perhaps, as clean as it should be, but for its customers its dereliction is its charm. They would go nowhere else.
There are only six or seven this side of the screen, and on the other side, to judge from the light voices that float under the ceiling on steam clouds, a few more. Taro is perched on an upturned bucket, a towel round his neck. Yuji joins him, scrubs Taro’s back. Taro scrubs Yuji’s. Clean, they climb into one of the baths (not the hottest, nor the one with the swaying bag of medicinal herbs). They shut their eyes and sigh.
‘Junzo?’ asks Yuji.
‘Mmm?’
‘Junzo?’
‘Supposed to be here.’
‘Ah.’
‘Mmm.’
It’s twenty minutes before Junzo arrives. Yuji, with one ear cocked to the cooing and chattering of the women — he knows Kyoko sometimes comes to Watanabe’s — watches him washing at the tap and thinks how easy it would be, through the steam, like looking through the fine linen of a mosquito net, to take him for a boy of thirteen or fourteen, though only two months ago they celebrated his twenty-first birthday at the billiard parlour on the Ginza, a raucous and beer-drenched occasion, half the philosophy class from Imperial there, singing or spewing . . . He has rarely traded schooldays stories with Junzo but can imagine well enough how things might have been. Did he too have to marry himself to a creature like Saburo, or did brains and little-dog fearlessness and having Taro at his back keep him safe? For so much better made is the elder brother than the younger — who seems, by comparison, to have been stitched together from whatever was left over, the trimmings — even big-fisted Saburo would think twice before taking him on. When Taro was called up for his year of service (it was 1935 and still, despite the best efforts of the military, a time of peace), he was barely out of basic training before they were using him to put some muscle on the city limbs of the new intakes. Barracks judo champion, a sprinter, a notable swimmer, he never even had to leave Tokyo. Just the type the army is always hungry for, the sort who makes them look the way they like to imagine themselves — virile, graceful, natural conquerors.
A different story when they are faced with material like Yuji or Junzo. Then they feel offended, and something wild comes into their eyes. Captain Mori, the officer who, in the July of Yuji’s twentieth year, examined him in the gymnasium of a high school in Hongo, had particularly expressive eyes, and for three minutes, as Yuji stood in his underwear in front of the desk, the captain had stared at him with such a concentration of contempt it was as if all the oxygen was being sucked out of the room. Between them, on the gymnasium floor, was a sixteen-kilo burlap sack of rice. The captain ordered Yuji to lift it over his head. Yuji, bending, gripping two burlap ears, dragged the sack to his waist, swung it towards his chest, and for a second seemed to have it there safely, before some lapse of will, some failure of technique, sent it plunging to the floor again, where it landed with such a thud it startled into flight a pair of horseflies mating on the tip of the captain’s swagger stick. He was made to try twice more. The last time, he could hoist the sack no higher than his thighs, and at this, this failure, this sickening display, the captain sprang from behind his desk. Despite the heat, he began to demonstrate a callisthenics routine, performing the moves as if tearing to shreds an invisible mattress. Black moons appeared beneath the arms of his field shirt. After a minute he stopped (he was not so fit himself), snorted, mopped his face, and informed Yuji that the army would rather have a schoolgirl than him, it would rather have a Korean, it would rather have . . Yuji, head bowed, kept his gaze on the desk. In the open file he could see Dr Kushida’s letter, typed on clinic stationery, a large military stamp on the top left corner. Approved? Not approved? The captain sat down, rocked on the rear legs of his chair and lit a cigarette. To his NCO he said (no longer shouting, no longer interested), ‘Mark this hero down Class F. Health grounds. Case to be reviewed in twelve months . .’
He has never been recalled. Nor — as long as Kushida could be relied upon to send his annual letter — did he think it likely he ever would be. Why should the Emperor burn such crooked timber as Yuji Takano or Junzo Miyazaki — for Junzo, along with his student deferment, has a Class D — when each year another half-million boys turn twenty and repopulate the empty parade grounds? But this was before the fighting at the Khalka river, the fighting at Changsha, the casualties at Changsha, the defeat at Changsha, the calls for a new offensive, an invincible tide of fighting men to sweep away the nation’s enemies once and for all. Would half a million be enough for that? A million? Last month Ozono’s son, who can barely see across the street without his glasses, received his red paper. How long, then, before everyone was equally suitable, and some functionary at the War Ministry placed quite a different stamp at the top of the doctor’s letter?
Pink from the heat of the baths, they retire to the matted room upstairs, a little mah-jong hall old Watanabe, in a brief and long-since dissipated mood of entrepreneurial ambition, took over on the death of the previous owner. The maid brings the young men beer and salt crackers. As they start to drink, Junzo, to explain his late arrival and the green bruise on his cheek the water has brought out, tells the others about the book fight in the corridor of the philosophy building, the Hegel gang versus the Schopenhauer gang. His bruise was The World as Will and Idea glancing off his cheekbone, a blow he repaid with volume three of The Science of Logic that split open his opponent’s lip.
‘So you were in the Hegel gang,’ says Yuji. ‘For the beauty of his dialectics?’
Junzo shrugs. ‘Schopenhauer hated women,’ he says.
Taro grins at Yuji. ‘Little brother’s in love,’ he says, ‘but it seems he has sworn never to reveal her name.’
‘Could it be Mrs Watanabe?’ whispers Yuji, for which he is shot with a star-shaped cracker that ricochets off his chin and lands in his beer. He fires back but misses.
Mr Watanabe, presiding over a mah-jong game on the far side of the room, scolds them. They are, apparently, disturbing the concentration of the players, four bathhouse regulars slamming down the little tiles as though to shatter them. Taro apologises, then looks at his brother and Yuji with a quick frown as if to say that he, a government employee, cannot any longer conduct himself so carelessly, that something more and better is expected of him. It’s a look Yuji sees on his face more frequently these days.
For a minute, sipping at their beers, scratching their chins, inspecting fingernails, they are silent. Then Yuji, under cover of the game’s clatter, calls to order a meeting of the club.
‘Any business?’
‘J’ai vu Alissa,’ begins Junzo, ‘in Kyobashi with one of her piano students. She said her father has agreed to a film evening, the first Sunday of next month. She asked me to suggest a film.’
‘You?’
‘Why not?’
‘I hope you didn’t ask for Cyrano de Bergerac again,’ says Taro. ‘Why don’t we have The Thief of Baghdad or Iron Horse?’
‘My vote,’ says Yuji, ‘is for The Blue Angel. Or maybe Flesh and the Devil.’
‘It doesn’t matter what you want,’ says Junzo. ‘She asked me and I said we’d be happy with anything by Chaplin. Any objections?’
There are no objections.
‘That’s enough French,’ says Taro, flicking his eyes towards another bather, a sharp-featured man, who, nursing his beer, has, perhaps, been taking an interest in them, this foreign babble between them. They lean away from each other, sit on their heels again.
‘But you’re really making progress,’ says Yuji, softly, in Japanese, to Junzo, and though he says no more, not wanting to cause embarrassment or a swollen head, he considers Junzo’s progress in the language to be nothing less than remarkable. For himself, for Taro, there were the years with Professor Komada. They could even count Monsieur Feneon as one of their teachers, for everyone made good progress once the professor persuaded him to take the short walk from his house each month in order that the senior class might come to know for the first time an actual Frenchman. The other members of the club, Shozo and Oki, have all the resources of the language school at Keio. Only Junzo (who in his first term at Imperial successfully pestered his brother to show him this club where Japanese and foreigners mingled so informally) has had to rely on his own efforts, on the occasional class from Taro, some prompting from Yuji. Alissa, of course, is always patient with him, untangling his grammar, making him study her lips as she pronounces some phrase the Japanese mouth seems hardly framed for.
Across the room, the mah-jong ends with shouts, accusations. Two of the players walk out, the other two growl like street dogs. Mr Watanabe, with an expression of high disdain, totters away to the kitchen and the rattan armchair beside the hot-air flue, a snug corner for drinking shochu and smoking homemade cigarettes, and where, once or twice a year, sleep hitting him like a wave, he sets fire to himself and wakes to the sound of his own shrieking.
Hungry, suddenly bored of the old bathhouse, the three friends put on still-damp shoes and coats and march through the cold to eat sushi at Kawashima’s. They arrive as three others are leaving and take their places along the counter on three warmed stools. Behind them, the tables have their usual mix of diners, the casual, and those of a more serious character, for though the most dedicated of the tsu will not eat sushi later than midday, fearing for its freshness, even at night there are men who lean over their food like scholars, who eat without speaking, who know everything. .
Yuji has squid and tuna belly, mackerel, kuruma prawn. The little plates mount up. He becomes morose at the thought of the expense. Kawashima’s is far from cheap, and once he has paid Taro what he owes him, he will have spent a week’s money in an evening — a perfect example of the recklessness he can no longer afford. But as his mood blackens so his appetite grows perversely sharper. He tries the blue-fin, the scallop, the Pacific saury.
‘I thought you were out of cash,’ says Junzo. ‘The allowance?’
‘Exactly,’ says Yuji.
‘That’s tough,’ says Taro.
‘On the positive side,’ says Junzo, dipping the tip of a little finger into the Murasaki sauce, ‘perhaps your need will inspire you.’
‘To leap into the Sumida?’
‘Ah, but are you the type?’
‘Seriously,’ asks Taro, ‘what will you do now?’
‘Shave my head and squat in the subway with a begging bowl.’
‘You could still take the Civil Service exams . .’
‘I’m too old. It would look odd. Like I had failed at something else.’
‘There’s always school teaching,’ says Junzo. ‘Couldn’t you bear it for a year or two?’
‘Just the smell of a classroom makes me want to throw up.’
‘Well, there’ll be something for you,’ says Taro. ‘A man of your talent. Something will come along.’
Yuji thanks him, but in that moment all three fall silent as if struck by the same thought, the same vision of what, one day soon, might come along for them. Their silence catches the sushi-master’s attention. He glances up — three young men scowling at the polished wood of the counter — but his hands go on with their work. There is no discernible pause in the movement of his blade.
Out of the throng at the Kanda bookstalls, boss-eyed Ooka taps the shoulder of Yuji’s greatcoat and tells him he’s seen a copy of Electric Dragonfly on sale, good as new, not a crease or a thumbprint, nothing, in fact, to suggest that anyone has even held it, yet alone read it. It was on Yoshimasu’s stall but maybe it’s gone now.
‘I expect some pretty girl has bought it. Pretty girls like poetry, don’t they?’ He laughs, and Yuji laughs, too, then comes straight home and shuts himself in his room.
How many others are there out there, untouched, unread, not even a crease or a thumbprint, no tea ring, no ink splash? Is there anything sadder or more useless in the world than a book of poems nobody wants?
Though Grandfather’s home lies within the thirty-five wards of the city, reaching it is like going on a trip to the country. Tram, subway, train, then a forty-minute walk past new homes, building plots, fields of tea, rice paddies, even a pair of thatched farmhouses like Uncle Kensuke’s.
From the garden gates a gravel pathway curves between persimmon and plum trees, jujube, maples. Then after a hundred steps the ground on one side is suddenly clear, and there, beneath a dreaming pine, is the old rickshaw, its leather hood bright with moss, its painted spokes woven with long grasses. It is not the rickshaw, of course, the one in which, in the time of the Meiji Emperor (or so the story is told), the eighteen-year-old grandfather — already known among his fellow runners as ‘Iron Thighs’ — pulled some eccentric actor the 230 miles from Tokyo to Kyoto to attend a moon-viewing party in a villa above the Daisen Temple. This one, used now by the hens as a roost, is only a souvenir bought for a few yen from a scrap merchant in Honjo, but each time Yuji passes, he is tempted to lift its shafts out of the grass, to lean his weight against the chest bar, to rock it a little. Has he inherited any of the old man’s skill or strength? How far would he get, even with hens for passengers? As far as the station? As far as the road?
Another hundred steps and the house appears, low and weathered under a heavy roof of blue tiles. Grandfather’s housekeeper, Sonoko, is outside, leaning over a starching board she has propped against one of the verandah corner posts. Hearing Yuji, she straightens and wipes her brow with the back of her hand, like a countrywoman looking up from harvesting. She’s forty, forty-five. Dark-skinned, a few freckles across her cheeks, broad hips swelling the lines of her kimono. Pretty in a rustic, old-world way, and with some unusual quality of stillness, of inner poise, that makes Yuji think how pleasant it would be to lie with his head on her lap and sleep for an hour, as he assumes — as everyone assumes — Grandfather sometimes does.
‘He’s in the model room,’ she says.
He thanks her, though he would have looked nowhere else on a winter’s day at such an hour, just as, arriving on a summer’s morning, he would look first in the vegetable garden, or in autumn, in the shade of the trellis outside the kitchen where the pickling barrels are kept.
He pulls off his boots, crosses the eight-mat room, and announces himself at the doors to the twelve-mat, the model room. After a few moments he receives an invitation to enter.
‘I need your young eyes,’ says Grandfather, who is kneeling at the far end of the room, his head almost touching the mat as he peers under the shin-high table that carries the model. ‘There’s a boat down here somewhere. I must have caught it on my sleeve.’
Yuji kneels beside him. After half a minute he finds the boat in the shadow of a table leg. He lifts it, carefully, as though lifting a little singing insect, a kusa-hibari, perhaps, and places it in the palm of Grandfather’s hand.
‘I need stronger lights in here,’ says Grandfather. ‘Or,’ tapping an arm of his glasses, ‘a stronger pair of these.’
The boat, he explains, is a sweet-seller’s boat, the kind that used to be common enough on summer evenings in the old days, advertising its presence with the beating of a drum and carrying such delights as ‘moss in a stream’ and ‘the beautiful Bay of Tango’. He smiles to himself, smiles at his modern, half-Westernised grandson (a creature he should, perhaps, disapprove of, but never has, treating him always with a shrewd generosity of judgement which the boy’s father — the professor, the travelled man! — seems incapable of), then he takes a pair of bamboo tweezers and sets the boat down on the Sumida, that length of curving blue satin he cut from one of his wife’s obi the year she died, the year the model began.
‘So,’ he says, brushing a hand over the stubble on his skull, ‘I told you I had some interesting new pieces. Think you can find them?’
Pausing now and then to crouch and look more keenly, Yuji, in a sideways shuffle, slowly moves the length of the room where, on a table that leaves only the narrowest of corridors, the Low City, from Tsukiji to Umaya Bridge, has been rebuilt out of paper and pins, out of memory and street maps and stories. Hundreds of cardboard roofs, bicycles made from fuse wire, trees whose foliage is skeins of coloured wool. The sides of trams are cut from tins of soya oil. Utility wires are black thread from Sonoko’s sewing box. Those dogs coupling outside the fish market are chewed paper and Chinese ink, their tails a pair of bristles from a writing brush. The Low City, as it might have appeared the last day of August 1923. Still hours to go before anyone will notice a light bulb start to swing or see ripples in the surface of his tea.
‘These are new, I think,’ says Yuji, pointing to two geisha, tall as thimbles outside a tea house in the Yanagibashi district.
‘Shall we see where they’re going?’ asks Grandfather. He holds back the sleeve of his kimono and lifts off the roof of the tea house. Below — and Yuji half expects to see their faces turned up in horror — the tea-house guests are gathered in matted, discreetly screened rooms, while maids and brightly painted geisha dance attendance. Some twelve or fifteen of Grandfather’s buildings have been treated this way, including, below its roof garden, the top floor of the old Mitsukoshi, where Mother was shopping with Mrs Hatanaka when the first shocks hit the city, and where, escaping over the glass of the shattered display cases, she cut her feet so badly.
At midday, Sonoko calls them to eat. They sit around the table-stove. An iron pot is simmering on a stone tile. Sonoko, her hand wrapped in a piece of scorched linen, takes off the lid. Steam pours out, a scent of braised onions, the earthy scent of turnips and something else, something ripe and sweet and bloody.
‘Mountain whale?’ asks Yuji, using Grandfather’s name for the wild boar.
‘I thought we would have something special today,’ says Grandfather, ‘as your visits are rather infrequent.’
‘I apologise,’ says Yuji, ‘I would come more . .’
‘Have I,’ says Grandfather, ‘told you how, one winter, when I was out at Shizuoka, we hunted the young boars?’
‘Hunting . .’ says Yuji, who has heard the story many times. ‘At Shizuoka?’
‘All they could find to eat at such a season was yam. They dug them up, ate them until they were stuffed. As soon as we had shot one, we opened its belly, hauled out the guts. Ready-made yam sausages! Cooked them over the embers of a fire. Ate them with the snow falling on our shoulders . . Ah, a feast like that and you’re ready for the Mongol hordes!’
Yuji waits to see if he will start to sing. He often, under the press of such nostalgia, lets his voice roll from a growl into the wavering line of some old song, but today the stew is too tempting. They grin at each other, three at three, take up their chopsticks, lean towards the pot.
As they eat, Yuji tries to imagine what will happen when the model is finished — what will happen to the model and what will happen to Grandfather. The moment cannot be far away now, no more than another winter, two at most. Will he build an extension onto the house, turn the twelve mats into twenty, let the model grow north to Asakusa? Or will the end of the table be the end of his labours, his memorial to the last of Edo, to the spirit of his eldest grandson, to a thousand streets shaken to firewood then burnt to red ashes?
He has never said what he intends, only that the last piece will be a rickshaw and its runner hurrying past the Bank of Japan. And though he likes to announce this with a solemn, emphatic nod, Sonoko, in her gentle voice, teases him — ‘You were still pulling rickshaws in ’23? Was it your hobby, perhaps?’ — knowing perfectly well that in ’23 Grandfather was a valued customer at the bank, a rickshaw passenger, perhaps, but not for twenty years the man sweating between the poles. The teasing doesn’t offend. Grandfather knows she understands, and Yuji too. The model is a kind of poem, and in a poem time can be folded many different ways.
When they have eaten, when the lid is back on the pot, the pickle dish is empty and the rice tub returned to its winter wrap of plaited straw, Grandfather excuses himself, and with a quick wave, retreats to the back of the house for his afternoon nap.
Yuji goes with Sonoko onto the verandah. He puts on his boots. A breeze is ringing the little iron bell that hangs from the eaves (and how cold the sound is, like the tinkling of ice). When he is ready, and his coat is buttoned, she hands him a sheet of writing paper wrapped round a pair of ten-yen banknotes.
‘Grandfather understands your difficulty,’ she says, ‘but hopes you will learn soon what needs to be done.’ She bows to him. He pushes the money into his coat pocket and sets off down the path, his boots crunching over a lattice of winter shadows.
From the drying platform he watches Kyoko at the edge of the pond crumbling dried silkworm for her carp. He whistles to her — a soft, low whistle. She turns her head, but before she can find him the old woman rolls out of the house on her chilblained feet and immediately looks up to the platform. Startled, he steps back, hides behind the quilt airing over the drying poles. He wonders if his legs are still on view. He wonders if the old woman is possessed.
That afternoon he rings Makiyama’s office. Ito, one of his assistants, answers the phone. Makiyama isn’t there. Ito has nothing intelligent to say. Yuji hangs up. To find Makiyama he will have to hunt him, bar by bar, along the Ginza. But not today.
For supper they eat seven-herb stew. Dr Kushida is their guest. He informs Father that their colleague from Imperial, Mr Amano, has died of a brain seizure. Father nods, puffs on his cigarette. Yuji, touched by the sake, almost asks, ‘But is it serious?’
Night. On stockinged feet he comes down the stairs to fetch water from the kitchen. He steps over Miyo, who’s sighing in a dream as though some lover was with her, the soy-seller’s son perhaps, tampering with her virginity. In the Western room, a thin light spills over the rug as far as the circular dining table. He steps inside. The screens to the Japanese room are open and the light is coming from the box-lamp beside the alcove. Father is there, sitting cross-legged, surrounded by his collection of incense burners. He is cleaning them, wiping each one carefully with a cloth. On the dresser (next to the photograph of Father and Mother, stiff as dolls, outside the shrine on their wedding day), the hands of the clock stand at twenty to two, Thursday morning.
On the fourth day of the second month, the day of the Season-changing Festival, Yuji cycles through a dusk of lightly falling snow to the year’s first full meeting of the French Club. Arriving, he leans his bicycle against a drainpipe, unwinds the scarf from about his face, and rings the bell, a brass bell, round and scalloped like a flower.
He likes this ritual of ringing and waiting on the step. The house is a little fortress sealed off by red-brick walls, by the black panels of a stout wooden door. Unlike his own home — unlike almost any Japanese home — the inquisitive world cannot simply announce itself with a cry then get halfway in and crane its neck to see round a screen. It’s true, of course, there are windows, large ones, but those on the street are usually shuttered, while those on the upper floor give little away beyond a reflection of roofs and sky, or at night a thread of light between the curtains. It is, he believes, the sort of house the heroes and heroines (not the grandest, of course) of the novels he has read might live in, in Paris or London, or, more particularly, in Moscow or St Petersburg, for the house was built by a Russian in the year after the Nicholai Cathedral was finished. A foreign outpost in the hills of Kanda, a house — despite the new spirit in Japan, that disinterred hostility to the world beyond the black lines of the coasts — he is proud to be seen going into, and which, in the privacy of his own thoughts, he calls my house of life.
He is expecting Hanako, Feneon’s maid, to answer the bell, but it’s Feneon himself, tall, grey-eyed and dressed in an ankle-length smoking jacket of goose-grey silk, who ushers Yuji inside, the pug, Beatrice, peeping from between his slippers.
As he has hoped, Yuji is the first to arrive. He shakes off his boots and follows Feneon through the hall to the salon, where, in the centre of the room, Hanako is on her knees by the stove, grimacing and crimson-faced as she thrusts a poker into its mouth. The stove is a relict of the house’s original owner, a cask of black iron forged in a Russian foundry for Russian winters and decorated on its sides with a frieze of wild animals, birch trees, iron stars.
Alissa is sitting at the end of the sofa next to a lamp, an open book on her lap. There is no kimono tonight. Instead, she is wearing a black woollen dress, black stockings, a little red jacket fastened with a row of black buttons. Her hair, which at the year-forgetting party was arranged Shimada-style, is now in a simple glossy plait secured by a black ribbon. Her stick is propped against the rolled leather of the sofa’s arm.
‘Not much like spring, is it?’ she says, glancing behind her to the garden window, where snow flickers in the house light and lies along the grey limbs of the magnolia tree. To answer her, Yuji explains that the official opening of spring is not intended to indicate any imminent improvement in the weather but is connected to the yearly cycle of agriculture, the advent of a new planting season, the need for the community to purify itself through rituals such as the scattering of beans and the lighting of sacred fires. He knows, of course, she knows all this, knows it as well as he does himself, but she has spoken to him in Japanese and he wishes to rebuke her for it. On club nights he expects her to speak French. It is, in fact, a rule.
‘To warm you up a little,’ says Feneon, handing Yuji a dainty glass in which a mouthful of eau de vie is trembling. He gives a second glass to his daughter, then returns to the drinks table behind the piano for his own glass.
‘And what shall our toast be?’ he asks. ‘Health and happiness?’
‘An end to stupid wars,’ says Alissa.
‘Or at least,’ says Yuji, who here, in a borrowed language, has the dizzying sense he can say those things it would be most unwise to say anywhere else, ‘at least, perhaps, an end to conscription?’
Feneon rests a hand on his shoulder. Yuji hardly dares to breathe. They raise their glasses, sip, swallow. The doorbell rings. Beatrice leaps from the sofa and pursues Hanako into the hall.
‘Things will work out,’ says Feneon. ‘They usually do, somehow.’
‘The Emperor will come to his senses,’ says Alissa. ‘He’ll deal with the warmongers.’
‘The Emperor?’ says Feneon. ‘It seems to me we know very little about him. I’m not sure we should depend on him doing anything decisive.’
‘And in Europe,’ asks Yuji, wishing to remove the name of His Sacred Majesty from the conversation before they are intruded upon, ‘what can people depend on there?’
‘Oh,’ says Feneon, shaking his head, ‘on France making lots of speeches, being brave but at the same time utterly incompetent. On England making treaties, then looking after nothing but her own interests. On the Germans being good at catching trains and reducing everything to rubble. On the Russians . . well, who can tell what our friends the Russians will do?’
‘Arrive in Tokyo,’ says Alissa, ‘if the army keeps provoking them. It’s not 1904 any more. There’s Zhukov’s tanks to deal with this time.’
Taro, Junzo, Shozo and Oki enter the room, laughing together and rubbing their hands. They bow to Feneon then make a half-circle round the stove. At Junzo’s feet the dog dances on her hind legs. Junzo takes a square of chocolate from his pocket, reaches down and lets her, with her soft muzzle, her little tongue, eat from his hand.
‘Junzo’s the kindest of you,’ says Alissa.
‘Because he gives chocolate to an animal?’ asks Oki.
‘Animal!’ says Feneon. ‘Beatrice is a beautiful woman bewitched on the road by a goblin. If one of you would just agree to kiss her, I’m sure she’d change back to her old form. Don’t any of you want to get married?’
The young men, gazing at the dog, colour slightly and say nothing. Feneon, smiling to himself, goes to the table and fills more of the dainty glasses. They drink, give back the glasses, then file past the carved oak door into Feneon’s study. On the desk the projector is raised on a plinth of books (A Cochin Almanac, Warren’s Encyclopaedia of Industry, a volume of Darwin, of Malthus), its brass-bound lens aimed at a linen tablecloth stretched and pegged over the bookshelves. Alissa, with the pug in her lap, sits on the swivel-chair behind the desk, while the others take their places on the rug. Feneon, with the cuff of his smoking jacket, gives the lens a last polish. When he’s satisfied, he nods to Hanako, who pushes up the switch on the wall by the door. There’s a second of utter darkness, then the whirr of the projector’s motor, the ticking of spools, a cone of white light, the pulsing of numbers on the cloth and finally, appearing out of the broken grey like something surfacing at sea, the film’s title: Pay Day.
They’ve seen it before, of course, three or four times, but that’s expected, it doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter that the film is old, because that too is expected: all the films in Feneon’s collection date from before 1929, the year his little unofficial cinema in Saigon (that amusement for the ladies and gentlemen of the Foreign Section) caught fire during the second reel of Fool’s Paradise. What matters is the ritual of being there, the occasion’s innocence, like an echo of those childhoods they have so recently left behind them.
Yuji, his back against the side of the desk, looks between Junzo’s head and Shozo’s, chuckles at the Little Tramp’s antics, then — so familiar is it all, so comfortably familiar — lets his eyes stray from the tablecloth to the gilded spines of Feneon’s library, the silk scrolls on the wall, the Khmer masks, the rack of dragon pipes above the door, the glinting brass lamps from Laos, the Thai Buddha spectral and serene in the weird moonlight of the projector, and plays his usual guessing game as to where amid this clutter, this haul of an adventurer’s life, the letter from Rimbaud is lying, lost or hidden.
Out of the Frenchman’s hearing, the club is divided on the subject. Oki, with a wave of his cigarette, with that old man’s cynicism he affects, says it’s all a tease, a game of the sort foreigners often play, and which only a simple-minded Japanese would take seriously.
Taro asks them to consider the facts. Wasn’t Feneon’s father trading in the Arabian Gulf at the same time as Rimbaud? Doesn’t his family come from Sézanne, no more than a short ride from Rimbaud’s Charleville? And why would he make up such a thing, this man who, to the best of their knowledge, is scrupulous in all his dealings?
Shozo agrees, but argues that the letter never left France, or if it did, has long since vanished, blown away on a breeze or rolled into a taper to light someone’s evening pipe in any of a dozen cities from Pondicherry to Yokohama where Feneon has lived and done business.
As for Junzo, he is predictably stubborn. For him, the letter is somewhere in the house, somewhere near at hand, and for no better reason than because Alissa Feneon has told him so. She even claimed to have read it, though was, apparently, as evasive as her father when it came to speaking of the contents.
And Yuji? He does not know, not any more. Letters are rather fragile objects. By this winter of 1940 it would be more than fifty years old. Shozo, perhaps, is right. The letter is just a family legend now, like Grandfather’s journey to Kyoto. But he cannot, not yet, give up the delightful fantasy of one day catching sight of it, a ragged envelope left as a bookmark in some long ago put-aside novel, or forgotten in a drawer of tradesmen’s receipts or carelessly left among the sun-yellowed piles of Le Figaro under the study window. And inside, in ink paled to ochre — what? Ten lines of a lost poem? Some theory of poetics to set the professors on their heels? Or even something like advice, a hint on how to live, how to write, how to live as a poet, how to be brave enough for that.
When the film is over, they troop back to the salon. On the table between the sofa and the armchairs Hanako has put out plates and glasses and a cake of fresh eggs and French chocolate, baked by Alissa in honour of the year’s inaugural meeting. Only Feneon and Alissa drink wine — it would take too long, says Feneon, to educate the young men’s palates. For them there is beer in bottles that have been plugged for an hour into the snow of the garden.
Holding up his wine to the lamplight, tilting the glass, Feneon smiles lugubriously and says, in a low voice to Yuji at his side, that this time drinking red wine will be his only contribution to the defence of his country, his only patriotic act. Yuji nods, frowns, and thinks of the photograph in the study, the one that shows what Feneon did last time, the picture of the young soldier with his blond beard leaning with one of his comrades against the tracked, man-high wheel of an artillery piece. He longs to ask him how it was, what it was like to be a soldier, whether he was scared, scared all the time, but Junzo is doing his Chaplin walk, Beatrice is leaping at his heels, Alissa is helpless with laughter, and the moment is lost.
When they have devoured the cake, they sit around the stove for the evening’s discussion. It’s Shozo’s turn to choose the subject. He removes his glasses, blinks, puts the glasses on again, and with great seriousness, in good French, tells them that the question for debate is ‘Which of all the arts should be accounted the most sublime?’
‘Well,’ says Feneon, reaching for the wine bottle, ‘that should keep us busy.’
Having proposed the question, Shozo begins a defence of folk art, in particular those ancient dances still seen at country fairs and which, in his opinion, represent an unbroken tradition stretching back to the very origins of . .
Oki rolls his eyes. Folk dances might be all right for peasant farmers in Tohoku, but for everyone else . . ‘What about architecture? The Chrysler Building, the Bauhaus . . why can’t we build like that in Tokyo? Why doesn’t Tokyo look like New York? Maybe we need another earthquake.’ He turns and quickly, in Japanese, apologises to Yuji, who excuses him with a blink and starts on his own small speech, arguing not for poetry but for what he assumes would have been Feneon’s choice. Cinema, he says, is where the arts are brought together. All the most interesting artists now are film-makers. Isn’t Jean Renoir even greater than his father, Auguste? And who in Japan deserves more attention than Yasujiro Ozu or Mikio Naruse?
He’s warming to it, beginning to enjoy himself, the sound of himself, the accent he has worked so hard at, when Alissa cuts across him. Theatre, she says, is superior to cinema because a live performance is always superior to a recorded one. However many times a play is put on, however familiar the actors are with their parts, each performance is unique.
This, thinks Yuji, is an absurd objection. (And should a nineteen-year-old girl in the company of men, all of them, with the exception of Oki, at least a little older than her, express herself in such a forthright manner? Even for a foreign girl it is surely slightly improper.) He does not look at her, but assumes the tone of a professor whose lecture has been needlessly interrupted by one of his students. All performances, he says, regardless of whether they are filmed, have, at the moment of their enactment, the self-same quality of the unique. Celluloid is but a method of preserving this, which means therefore it remains, permanently, or at least in a practical, but also perhaps in an ontological sense, even at the thousandth time of showing—
‘I’m not sure,’ says Alissa, ‘anyone understands what you’re saying.’
‘My opinion,’ says Junzo, ‘is that in debates of this type one should always side with the person who knows how to make chocolate cake.’
‘Aren’t we forgetting music?’ asks Feneon.
‘In the West you have music,’ says Oki. ‘Here we have twanging.’
‘I’d rather have the music of the shamisen,’ says Alissa, sharply, ‘than almost anything. I’m bored to death with Schumann and Beethoven.’
‘But you play the lieder so sweetly,’ says Feneon. ‘I was lying in bed this morning listening to you.’
‘I play them very badly,’ she says, smiling at her father.
‘Won’t you play something now?’ asks Taro, the peacemaker. ‘Then we can settle this matter at once and give the prize to music.’
She shakes her head. She’s not in the mood, she’s unprepared, she does not give impromptu recitals, but Taro persists and the others join him, until, taking her stick, she gets up from the sofa, and goes to the piano. It’s an English make, Collard & Collard, an odd and lovely object that must have travelled half the world crated in the hold of some wallowing cargo vessel. She settles herself on the stool, looks put out, irritated, flicks through some pages of manuscript on the music stand, then shuts her eyes, opens them, and leans her whole body into the first soft chords. She plays for five, six minutes, no more, her head tilted to the side, an expression of intense listening on her face. The music spreads in ripples, its rhythms simple as a lullaby, light as spring rain. The debate, with its mixture of earnestness and nonsense, is forgotten. When she finishes, and the echo of the last deep note has faded, there’s a hush in which only the murmuring of the embers in the stove can be heard. They applaud. She blushes, stands, limps back to the sofa.
‘That was beautiful,’ says Yuji quietly, the words out of his mouth before he has considered them.
‘Chopin,’ she says, turning to him, her blush briefly deepening. ‘ “Grande Polonaise”. I’m glad you liked it.’
An earth-tremor at three in the afternoon. Yuji is in the garden, talking through the fence with Kyoko. The old woman and Haruyo are in the street haggling with the boiled-bean-seller. There’s a sudden breeze, the bamboo rustles. Under their fingers, the fence vibrates, under their feet, the earth. They wait, breathlessly, three, four seconds. Then everything resumes, everything is normal again.
In 1923, Kyoko was a small child in her home village in Saitama Prefecture. She thinks Yuji was in Tokyo. He has not chosen to correct her, and Saburo, he assumes, has simply forgotten, as Saburo forgets so much. He grins at her. She grins back. For a while they hold the fence as though, without their gripping it, it would fly into the air and be lost.
On Mother’s birthday, to please her, or rather, to honour her as one honours on certain auspicious dates the family ancestors, Yuji spends the day being as useful as he can. He tidies his room, puts his bedding to air, returns various cups and dishes to the kitchen. He helps Father in the garden weeding and pruning, and after lunch pays Otaki the money he owes. In his room again, he sews a button onto a suit, reads a dozen pages of Isabelle, learns a new French idiom (entre chien et loup). Then, a few minutes before five, the little parcel with its wrapping of dark red paper in his hands, he goes downstairs and slides open the doors to Mother’s room. Haruyo is there, hunched beside a brazier on which a small copper kettle is beginning to steam. She dips her head to him. He walks past her, past the folding screen, and kneels opposite Mother. He bows, and wishes her a happy birthday.
There is only a single lamp for the whole room, and not a bright one, so it’s difficult to tell if becoming fifty-one has made much difference to her. He can see no threads of grey in her hair, and the skin of her face — a little blue under the eyes — shows, in this light, barely a wrinkle. Of her body, wrapped in an unpatterned kimono and darker shawl, he has only the sense of something immensely fragile.
She says how nice it is to see him. He thanks her. Round their knees the shadows lie like pools of water. She smiles drowsily as though she has recently woken from a sleep or will shortly need one. Has he, she asks, lost some weight? He says it is unlikely. In the holidays everybody ate a great deal. ‘You know how you get in the winter,’ she says. He says he knows. ‘I pray for you,’ she says. He says he knows. He thanks her. ‘You must listen to Dr Kushida,’ she says. ‘He will advise you. He has been a good friend to the Takano family.’
Behind her head, Ryuichi, school uniform buttoned to the throat, school cap clasped in white-gloved hands, examines Yuji with a gaze he can only endure for a few seconds, such is the weight of judgement in those twelve-year-old eyes. Above the photograph is the slender cross of ivory tipped with iron presented to Grandfather Yakumo when he left the college in Seoul, and on the table below, a stick of incense, a flickering nightlight, an offering of mandarins.
He passes his mother her birthday present, a box of taorizakura cakes from the shop by Ueno Station. She thanks him. She says she hopes he hasn’t spent too much money on her. He assures her he hasn’t.
‘Really?’ she says, unwrapping her gift, ‘but it looks so expensive.’
‘Just something small . .’
‘You’ve been too generous.’
‘Not at all.’
‘Still . .’
Haruyo brings them tea, then retires to the far side of the screen. Though he would admit it to no one, Yuji is frightened of Haruyo, her slab face, the unseemly vivid bulk of her, afraid of her ever since the night — the second after his return from Uncle Kensuke’s — he crept down the stairs from his new room hoping to find comfort in Mother’s bed and found instead Haruyo, motionless by the side of a lantern whose flame splashed her shadow over the walls, big as a net. Nothing was said, but she looked at him then as no adult had looked at him before, certainly no adult he knew, no adult who lived in his home.
‘What is your news?’ asks Mother. ‘Let me hear your news.’
He tells her what seems appropriate, harmless. A few remarks about his friends, about what he’s been reading. He does not, of course, mention the matter of the allowance. Nothing of that nature can even be hinted at. They are silent for a minute. Yuji looks at his tea but does not pick it up.
‘Your father . .’ she says.
‘Yes?’
‘How hard it is for him now.’
Yuji drops his chin in what he hopes will be taken for a gesture of reflection. How long has he been in the room? Fifteen minutes? Half an hour?
‘There’s blossom on the plum tree,’ he says.
‘At the bottom of the garden?’
‘Yes.’
‘That was always the first.’
‘Shall I bring you some?’
‘Thank you,’ she says, ‘though sometimes I prefer just to picture it in my mind. It seems more perfect.’
He tells her — the clever boy lecturing his mother — how the old poets used to cover their windows on the night of the full moon so they could imagine its beauty rather than be distracted by anything so obvious as the thing itself.
She smiles. ‘My son,’ she says, ‘a poet . .’ And for a few seconds it looks as if she might hold out one of her long, white hands to him, as if the spell might break. But then she shivers and looks down. Behind the screen, Haruyo stirs in her fabrics, clears her throat. Yuji rises to his feet, his movements, in this strange room, soft as incense smoke.
That evening after supper he opens the doors of the storage cupboards that stand on the landing between his room and Father’s. The cupboards are so solid, so mysteriously large, he has no idea how they were brought into the house. Lowered through the roof? Carried up the stairs plank by plank and assembled there by a carpenter? For all the years of his life (and for years before that) the cupboards have been the dark and mothballed repositories of whatever was finished with but could not be thrown away. Bamboo fencing swords, school satchels, carp banners, kites, foreign hats long out of fashion. There are even parcels of baby clothes preserved by meticulous hands for some imagined continuation of the Takano line.
He wants to find Ryuichi’s gloves. Each boy had two pairs, white, with three rows of raised stitching on the back and a single mother-of-pearl button at the wrist. One pair of Ryuichi’s was, presumably, reduced to a powder of ashes, but the other . . He looks, does not find them, neither Ryuichi’s nor his own. Instead, behind a box of Shunkei lacquer, on which the remains of a large insect are lying, he discovers a pile of jazz records from the 1920s — Jimmy Harada, Noriko Awaya, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. One by one he slips them from their paper covers, runs the light over the shellac grooves, blows away grains of dust. There was music in this house once. Music and tapping feet, the wail of trumpets, voices, flippant or heartbroken, singing of love, the city, the future . .
He goes to his room, opens the door to the drying platform, steps up into the night air. He drags his bedding from the poles and carries it inside. It’s too early to sleep but too late to do much else. He spreads the bedding on the mats, then, still on hands and knees, recites to himself, like some manner of talking dog, the ghost poem from Electric Dragonfly.
Do ghosts get bored of being ghosts?
At night they burn like candle flames
But the days must be difficult —
Hearing children on the way to school,
Hearing the thrum of kite strings.
At the song of the red-hot-pepper vendor
Even a dead tongue burns.
There he stops, for though the poem has another four lines, there are tears falling onto the backs of his hands. He can no longer speak.
He finds Makiyama in a bar by Shibuya Station drinking beer with his assistants, Ito and Kiyooka. It’s four in the afternoon. At six they move to Sukiyabashi and start on the sake, then to the Black Pearl on the Ginza and finally through the stained-glass doors of the Don Juan, where they take one of the booths by the dance floor and Makiyama buys a bottle of whisky. A tango band is playing. The singer, in his white tuxedo, sighs into the microphone. Between the pillars, clouds of cigarette smoke shift in the breeze from a ceiling fan.
Sweating from the drink, Makiyama undoes the top button of his shirt, hangs his hat on his knee, and pulls the cork from the bottle. He’s thirty-five or thirty-six, dressed in a new suit of lime-green serge, a pair of tan and cream spats on his feet. In his jacket lapel he has a pin, a curious pin with a head of red glass, perhaps even a ruby. Does it mean something?
A waitress takes the seat beside him and starts to feed him peanuts, sweet-bean paste. On the other side of the booth, Ito and Kiyooka are watching the dancing, their heads moving in unison like a pair of Siamese cats in the window of a hairdresser’s shop.
Yuji hasn’t drunk like this for months. Beer, sake, whisky. The effort of keeping up, of being congenial, of remembering why he’s there at all, is starting to exhaust him. He has extracted no promises, nothing but a few vague and lordly assurances that may already have been forgotten. He sips from his glass and listens to Makiyama trying to impress the waitress with his wealth of connections, though it’s obvious she has never heard of any of them. Only when he mentions the pulp writer Kaoru Ishihara does she show any genuine interest.
‘Ishihara, eh?’
‘An old friend of mine. You could even call me a kind of mentor.’
‘Really! But it must be nice,’ she says, dropping another peanut into his mouth, ‘to know someone like Ishihara.’
He grins at her, then pushes her away and turns to Yuji. He has, he says, grinding the nut between his large yellow teeth, just had another of his celebrated intuitions. ‘Come closer,’ he says. ‘Lean closer.’
Hideo Makiyama’s story is a Low City story, his success a Low City success. No one seems quite sure of where he comes from — Honjo, perhaps, or Asakusa, or even somewhere out of town, some unlikely little place only the slow trains stop at. Has he attended university? Has he attended much high school? He seems to Yuji a man who would struggle to write a thank-you letter, and no more of an intellectual than Miyo. His talent — if talent is the right word — is of a different order entirely, simpler, much more lucrative, for behind the shine of his brow, his slick moustache, he possesses a gift of insight into the appetites of the crowd, their vanities, their fears, the strange fastidiousness of their obsessions, their fickleness, their love of novelty. He would have done as well in the dry-goods sector, or selling cars, or women’s fashion, except that literature offered a certain status, a certain respectability, though one that did not at all prohibit him from passing the working day in a Ginza beer hall. He has no prejudices. High art or low, he doesn’t care. Nor is he burdened by tradition, for he knows nothing of it. His questions are so simple, so childlike, so unapologetic, some of the older writers (who thought their reputations safe) live in terror of him. Will it sell? How many? To whom? What will the margins be? The percentages? The profit share? You cannot catch him out. His memory for numbers — monthly circulations, print runs — is unfailing. He knows (for example) that only thirty-seven copies of Electric Dragonfly were ever sold and this, at five per cent of two yen per copy, represented an income of three yen and seventy sen, a contemptible sum even by the miserable standards of the genre. A head for numbers is starting to make him wealthy. Numbers, and a snout like those dogs one sees foraging in the spilt bins behind restaurants.
At midnight the band starts to pack away their instruments. The dancers-for-hire sit down and rub their aching calves. The waitresses are tired too. They move from booth to booth collecting bills, their sandals scuffing the wooden floor. Startling from a short sleep, Makiyama drops a banknote on the table, crams his hat on his head, and strides down to the Ginza Crossing, where he stops a one-yen taxi by stepping in front of it and spreading his arms. They squeeze, all four of them, into the back. Makiyama calls an address to the driver, who seems to know it. They jolt forwards, cruise awhile under the lights of the Ginza, then turn up towards the park and into the darker, emptier streets around the government buildings.
As they travel, and the wind stirs the litter from the night-stalls, Makiyama starts to sing. It’s the lovers-parting-in-the-dawn-mist song from a new musical he’s invested in at the Moulin Rouge in Shinjuku. Then he breaks off and says it’s a shame, a damned shame what they did to your father. Writing a few lines about the Emperor — what was it? Fifteen years ago? — really came back to kick him in the teeth, eh? It was tough. It was damned tough. But certain things just couldn’t be allowed any more, and if the people at the top didn’t set an example, what could you expect from the riff-raff? It wasn’t personal. Just a question of discipline, of being ready for what was coming, of showing the world that Japan meant business. Even so, yes, he was sorry for what had happened, genuinely sorry for the Takano family’s misfortune.
Yuji, trapped against the car door, bows as best he can. The speech has surprised him. He is also surprised at how grateful he feels, though it’s inconceivable that Makiyama has ever read the 482 pages of Democratic Principles and the Japanese Constitution, or has the slightest real grasp of Father’s arguments. The same, of course, could be said about most of the others, those whose muttering — or in some cases shrieking, hysterical shrieking — made, in the end, Father’s situation intolerable. And now that they have pulled him down, they will, perhaps, like Makiyama, begin to pity him, so that in a few years it will appear he fell through something as natural and implacable as bad luck, his enemies nothing more than bystanders, innocent witnesses to an event they could not possibly have altered the outcome of.
They stop at the mouth of a stone-paved alley somewhere in Sanbancho. The neighbourhood is poorly lit. The houses have their eaves pulled low, like caps. The alley is so narrow they have to go in single file. At the end, there is a little shrine to the fox god. A woman is praying there, but hearing the men, she lifts the hems of her kimono and hurries, on wooden soles, through a doorway where a lantern marked with the characters for falling leaves swings its crimson light in the wind.
They follow her inside. Makiyama shouts for service. The hostess of the house appears, trotting out of her booth and calling a welcome. Recognising Makiyama, telling him how well he’s looking, how prosperous, she leads them up the stairs and along a corridor to a room at the back of the house. From the tobacco haze, the smell of fish, it’s evident the room has only recently been vacated. A maid appears and straightens out the sitting cushions, polishes the table. Yuji slips the catch on the window. There’s a courtyard below with a few shrubs, a line of sake kegs outside the open doorway of the kitchen. On the far side of the courtyard, where shadows blur and focus behind the paper windows, a girl’s voice is singing to the accompaniment of a shamisen: ‘Yes, I am in love. They were talking about me before daylight . . though I began to love without knowing it . .’
The maid brings in a tray of tea and sweets, then a tray with sake flasks and sake cups. Yuji shuts the window and joins the others at the table. The hostess is telling them the local scandals — affairs, jealous lovers, who’s in money trouble, who’s disgraced. After twenty minutes the doors slide open. Two girls are kneeling in the corridor. They chant their greeting and enter. One of them Yuji recognises as the waitress from the Don Juan. The other is perhaps also a waitress, though with her purple kimono, the ribbons of raw silk in her hair, she could pass for a certain grade of geisha. She is not as pretty as the girl from the Don Juan but when she starts to talk it’s obvious she’s a natural storyteller, an excellent mimic. Soon she’s the favourite, and takes her place beside the sprawling Makiyama. The other girl, seeing that Ito and Kiyooka can have no interest in her, kneels in front of Yuji, picks a flask from the table, and fills his cup. She asks him if he likes to drink, if he likes the Ginza, if he likes tango or prefers some other kind of music. Does he ever go skiing in the winter? For herself, she has never skied, though sometimes she thinks she would like to try. How cold it is these last days. Cold as anything.
Every minute or two (though minutes are no longer evenly divided but float like globs of fat in water) Yuji holds out his cup and watches her replenish it. Now and then she lets him fill a cup for her. He wants to make her drunk — as drunk as he is himself. Then they will be helpless as children, and the worst that could happen is they wake in a pile on the mat together, daylight streaming through the window. He doesn’t mind that. What worries him is that she’s been given orders — by the hostess, by Makiyama even — to do something with him (or whichever of the men shows a taste for her). He steals glances at her while she pours for him, and sees, with inebriated clarity, that what is natural in her, her youth — she’s several years younger than him — her laboured, youthful interest in him, is not yet entirely sunk in artifice or the fatigue of her trade. She has little in common, then — little beyond the obvious — with the woman in the room behind Yokohama Docks, but it’s her he starts to think of now, of the hour he spent with her after the negotiations with Momoyo’s family had failed and in his anger, in the violence of his disappointment, he had set out to prove that love was an itch any man could satisfy by spending a few yen.
The place he chose, a street of unlicensed women, he had heard about from a student bragging at the university, and though it meant a train ride it also offered anonymity, for in Tokyo, a city where one is always running into the same people, where coincidences grow like bindweed (read Kafu), who knew who might, at the wrong moment, look out of a restaurant window, a passing taxi. .
The room he finally entered — he had walked the length of that street a dozen times, building his resolve — had nothing but a narrow mattress on the floor, and walls so thin any passing sailor could have punched a hole and watched the woman laugh at him, his ignorance. She called him, as she unbuttoned his shirt, her ‘little virgin’, and when, hotly, he protested this, telling her how his mother’s friend Mrs Sasaki, under the guise of giving him some of her deceased husband’s good clothes, had, shortly after his nineteenth birthday, made him ‘a man who knows women’, she applauded with her fingertips, crying, ‘So you’ve done it once! With one of Mama’s friends! Congratulations!’ And with this woman, with her gold teeth, her tongue like a stick, he let himself be intimate, had lain on her, gasping and writhing as though swimming through sewage.
The hostess is at the door. She is so sorry to disturb them, but she wishes the gentlemen to know that the bath is ready. She bows, withdraws. The girl with the ribbons hauls Makiyama to his feet. Yuji, an unlit cigarette between his fingers (who gave it to him? If he smoked it, he’d choke), hears himself talking — passionately, insistently — about Momoyo, his dear Momoyo, with whom he shared a thousand silent glances of innocent devotion. If they had married, he would by now — it can be taken for granted — be established in some reputable university or publishing house or newspaper office or something. Certainly he would not be living in a former sewing room. He would not be writing about toothpaste. They would have an old house in the High City, a verandah, tangled with flowers. And then a child, a grandchild for Mother, a little boy who, as the first-born, could even be called Ryuichi.
‘But how nice,’ says the waitress, quickly hiding her yawn. ‘So you’re definitely going to marry her?’
‘Who?’
‘Miss Momoyo?’
‘But this was years ago. Don’t you get it? Her family refused to permit the match. They sent a letter to my father. “Momoyo is, regretfully, too young for such a momentous step.” It was a stupid lie, of course. The truth was, they could never let their daughter marry into a family in which the mother had not left the house in a decade. It would be even easier for them, today. Today we would not even dare to ask.’
The waitress looks confused, then sorry for him. He knows that he should ask her something now, should flirt with her, make jokes, even if they’re bad ones, but he needs, quite urgently, to find the toilets, to be privately in the darkness, to press his forehead against something cool.
He puts down his cup, then climbs a rope of air until he’s standing. Somehow he gets clear of the room. The corridor is bright, bare. No one’s about. He cannot remember where the stairs are. He takes a few steps in one direction, a few in the other. Through the walls and doors of the rooms on either side of him come murmurings, muffled laughter. He hears what sounds like a woman weeping. He wishes it would stop. He wants to leave now. He must leave . .
At his shoulder, a door slides back, half the width of a face at first, then wider. The girl with the ribbons is there, undressed to her under-kimono, which is bound so loosely it looks as if at any sudden movement it must slip to the floor. Below her throat he can see the place where her make-up ends and the rose of unpowdered skin begins.
‘Your boss is snoring,’ she whispers, ‘and now I have no one to wash my back.’ She pouts at him, widens her eyes.
He asks her where the toilets are.
‘Downstairs,’ she says, and points. ‘Shall I wait for you?’ she asks.
‘Please do,’ he says. ‘Yes.’
She bows. He backs away, finds the stairs, finds the stalls, vomits, spits into the stinking hole, then sits on the step in the foyer putting on his boots. He has, in a way he cannot begin to comprehend, lost one of his socks. The sight of his naked foot moves him almost to tears. He is touching it, stroking it as if it was some poor hairless cat, when a movement in the mirror beside the door makes him glance up. The hostess is standing behind him at the bottom of the stairs. There is nothing kind in that face and he does not dare to turn. He thrusts his feet, the bare and the dressed, into his boots, ties the laces, snatches his coat, and plunges into the alley, racing headlong through Sanbancho, a runner matched against himself.
Twenty-four hours after reaching home from the House of Falling Leaves, his winter illness begins. It announces itself with the usual prefatory dream, a fire dream in which he stumbles through dense smoke across a field of charred grass in search of the boy with the shutter.
He has had these dreams so many years now it is hard to know where history ends and the invention of his dreams begins. Certain things, of course, he has no need to question, for they are facts known to everyone. He has not simply dreamt the thirty thousand who burnt to death in the grounds of the old army-clothing depot on the east bank and whose charred bones and blackened teeth are still uncovered by builders, by anglers digging for bait, by ghoulish children. But the rest of it — the boy, the shutter, the miraculous escape — where did he hear all this? Did Father tell him? Grandfather? Someone at school? Or was it one of those newspaper accounts, those ‘My Story’ columns that ran for months after the earthquake, tales of improbable survival that began with lines such as ‘I was sitting quietly a home . .’ or, ‘Just as I turned into Okura Dori . .’
The boy — for this is what Yuji remembers of it, what he believes he remembers, what he would set down as an account, more or less accurate, of the actual events — was from the Low City and not perhaps the eleven- or twelve-year-old he is in the dreams but a teenager or even a young man of sixteen or seventeen who, once the fires started soon after the first shocks at midday (shocks so violent the seismographs at the Central Weather Bureau were immediately rendered useless), would have been a link in those disciplined chains of neighbours who went on passing water from the wells until, unable to keep their faces to such a terrible heat, they dropped their buckets and fled. Some then returned to their homes to rescue a roll of cash, a tethered dog, a household shrine. Of these, most were never seen again. The rest, the boy and his family among them, retreated through blazing streets towards the river, only to find the bridges were also burning. Overwhelmed by exhaustion, tormented by heat and smoke, hundreds leapt into the water where, in the days that followed, their swollen corpses, face down, jostled each other in the currents. Those who still had the strength for it fought their way along the bank until they found a bridge intact, then streamed across it, lifted now by the wild hope of saving themselves on the far side.
From somewhere — the ruins of his own house or the debris in the street — the boy had picked up a wooden shutter to protect himself from the rain of sparks and cinders that grew heavier with every moment. With this held over his head, he waited, one of the thirty thousand, in the grounds of the old depot.
By the middle of the afternoon, observers in the hills of the High City could see a number of fire storms, swirling columns of fire hundreds of feet high, collecting over the surface of the river. People took photographs, but these, in their stillness and silence, record only great areas of darkness, a blurring, like collapsed sky. Of the fire’s shrieking, its unpredictable movement, the quality of intention it possessed, no means existed to convey such horror. Whatever the storms touched — a boat, the piers of a bridge, the shady honeycomb of a waterside pleasure house — it was consumed in an instant as though by a force infinitely more destructive than fire. At last, at four in the afternoon — the moment recorded precisely on the heat-shocked faces of countless wristwatches — the largest of the storms discovered the crowd in the grounds of the depot, and having nothing left to burn, and ravenous for fuel, it fell on them. In an instant, the field became a furnace. Men and women, who seconds before had wept or prayed, were suddenly welded into tangled house-high sculptures of blackened limbs. But as the fire raced forwards (more like a great body of water now, a death-wave), it sent ahead a violent wind that surged beneath the boy’s shutter and flung him upwards with such force and speed the flames, quick as they were, could only roll and boil beneath him as he flew.
How high did he go? As high as the wind? As high as the black pall that had formed over the city and later doused the embers with a rain black as tar? He was found on the afternoon of 2 September, lying completely naked in the Yasuda Gardens, the shutter wedged in the boughs of a nearby tree. The soles of his feet were scorched and all the hair had been singed from his body, but he was otherwise unharmed. On waking he remembered nothing. Later, he recalled seeing birds, vast flocks of them, flying across the face of the sun.
Of the dreams, no two are quite the same, but in all of them Yuji must cross the grounds and find the boy before the storm falls. He must crawl under the shutter with him. He must cling on and brace himself for the fire, wind and flight that follow. Sometimes he comes within a dozen strides of the boy; at others he can see nothing but the tormented crowd. This time, this dream, he is close enough to glimpse the boy’s bare legs under the smoking wood of the shutter, and he is fighting his way forward, fighting with a desperate strength, when suddenly he sees, in ordinary daylight, Miyo with a basket of washing in her arms looking at him quizzically from the step of the drying platform. She puts down the washing and hurries off. A few minutes later Father is there, kneeling beside the mattress and smelling faintly of ink and cigarettes. He puts a hand on Yuji’s brow. He says something. Yuji hears himself reply, a voice that blossoms out of the air between them and says the strangest things. Father goes. Miyo comes back. She has a bowl, some medicinal broth, its steam acrid as smoke. She holds it to his lips and when, a minute later, he brings it up again, she cleans him.
He knows his body is suffering. He observes the familiar symptoms, the signs both sides of the skin that he is in for an unpleasant ride, perhaps a dangerous one, but his mind is buoyant, gently exhilarated, and sits on his flesh like a butterfly on a statue. His neck aches a little, his mouth is dry, but it doesn’t matter. February sunlight is pouring through the panes of the drying-platform door and everything, the piles of books, the backs of his own pale hands, the light itself, seems precious and extraordinary. He would, he thinks, be quite content to die like this, to leave the world with this accelerated sense of things. First, of course, like the old poets, like Basho taken ill on the road outside Osaka, he must compose his death poem, but the lines that come to him, far from being solemn, wistful, somewhat wry, are all exclamatory and pathetic, like the lines a stage lover cries before he swallows poison. And who would he dictate it to, this death poem? To Father? To Miyo, dabbing his face with a cloth? He squints at her. She smiles. He wonders what she would do if, under the guise of sickness, of a fidgety delirium, he reached a hand inside her kimono. Would she run away? Or would she loosen her obi, keep her gaze on the wall? He shuts his eyes. A dying poet should not spend his last hours stroking, in his imagination, the thighs of a housemaid. (And wasn’t he offered far more than this in the House of Falling Leaves? An offer he fled from like a frightened boy.)
When he opens his eyes again, Dr Kushida is in the room, black bag in hand, his face quite expressionless, the way, perhaps, he had once looked at poor Amano. From the bag he takes a syringe, loads it from a glass ampoule, pulls down the quilt, rolls Yuji onto his side, and injects him in the muscles of the right buttock. The injection is bizarrely painful. Yuji groans, though in a voice so small it’s like the voice of a mosquito. The doctor shines a light in his eyes, then presses the ivory horn of his stethoscope so hard against the flushed skin of Yuji’s chest it leaves behind a pattern of raw circles.
On later visits he burns, in leisurely fashion, little balls of moxa on Yuji’s back. There are more injections — neuronal, trional, camphor. And as Yuji coughs phlegm into a bowl or lies prostrate (all lightness has passed now, his body is wet earth, a sack of wet earth), Kushida, in a low voice, a confidential purr, talks to him about the cases he has at the clinic, and in particular the venereal cases. Gonorrhoea, syphilis, sores that never heal, or seem to heal only to break open again months later. He never speaks of such things when Father is present. With a half-smile he offers Yuji advice, telling him that if he goes with a woman he suspects is unclean (‘and so many are, so many’), afterwards he should wash his genitals in his own urine. Is this what Mother meant when she told Yuji to listen to Dr Kushida, that the doctor was a good friend of the Takano family?
His fever builds, breaks in a drench of sweating. In the days that follow he passes hours gazing at the old language of cracks on the ceiling. Questions appear — the sort that lethargy incites but cannot answer. He longs to be left alone, to be wretched alone, but the hours are punctuated by visits — Father, Miyo, Kushida, even, one afternoon, Haruyo, who stands above him like a wall and recites the message from Mother, her expression of concern, her wishes for his recovery.
And then, from no observable cause other than the slow accretion of new strength, he wakes out of a deep sleep, seventeen days after falling ill, and listens, with simple curiosity, to the noises of the street — the tofu-seller’s bugle, the play of wind chimes, the chattering of sewing machines and radios. He sits up. When the dizziness passes he drinks the water by his bed and washes the taste of medicine from his mouth. He dips two fingers into the glass and wipes his brow, his eyelids. He is setting the glass down again when he sees the marks on his hand, the scatter of ink scratches over the muscle at the base of his left thumb. He angles his hand to the light, then turns it so that his fingers point towards his chest. Is . . hi . . ha . .
Ishihara.
Ishihara!
It is a full minute before he can explain it to himself, can draw to the top of his mind the memory of Hideo Makiyama leaning across to him, pen in hand, under the slowly turning blades of the ceiling fan in the Don Juan. The intuition. The wonderful idea. He did not want Fritz Lang, or that troublesome neurasthenic Akutagawa. He certainly did not want Arthur Rimbaud (Arthur who?), with or without the mysterious letter. What was needed, what was long overdue, what he — and therefore the public — had a raging thirst for, was a comprehensive study of the young star of modern Japanese writing, the author whose books were read even by those who, strictly speaking, could not be called readers at all, who did not give a damn about ‘literature’ or the values of so-called educated people and who could only be spoken to by a man with a genius for simplicity. And this was his offer, this he would allow Yuji to attempt. And to seal the matter, to make some manner of contract between them, he had clutched Yuji’s fingers between his own and written, with a few quick darts of his pen, Ishihara’s name, an act so pointless, so entirely ludicrous, Yuji, his head already throbbing from the drink, had let the moment fall like spilt ash to the dark of the bar’s floor.
Cautiously, he stands up from the mattress. He puts a jacket round his shoulders and goes onto the platform. A fine rain is falling, and further off, in columns of blue shadow, a heavier rain is falling over the Low City. There is no one in the Kitamura Garden. In his own garden, Miyo is hurrying back from the privy, sheltering herself under an umbrella painted with irises. He holds out his hands. On his palms he feels each raindrop’s soft arrival. He should, he knows, attempt to be like rain, to have the same indifference and generosity. He also knows that by tomorrow he will have quite forgotten the wisdom of this.
Downstairs for the first time in three weeks, he sits in the calm of the Japanese room, sipping tea and waiting for the bath to fill. In the alcove, the scroll has been changed. The snow, the bowed pine trees, the men ascending, have been replaced with a painting of bush warblers on a branch of plum blossom.
The bath is so hot his body becomes numb. He lies there, fingering the soft fringe of ragged hair at his chin, his sick-man’s beard. The light of a spring day is slanting through the vent in the wall above him, a clear gold light that falls on the little bran sack Mother uses in place of soap. The season has moved on while he lay upstairs, the year has turned. He should be pleased, but the thought of going back, of starting again the struggle involved even in an existence like his . . is he ready for that? It is almost a relief when, standing up from the bath, he is swept by a sensation of profound weakness, so that for several seconds, as the light flickers and the water drips from his skin, he can do nothing but stand there, wavering between the elements.
The last of the night sweats give way to nights of honest sleep. His face, smooth-shaven again, loses its shadows. In weak sunshine he takes strolls in the garden, little restorative circuits in which he breathes, as deeply as he can, the ripening air. He is out there one afternoon, reading on the stump of the old pine tree they cut down in Showa 10, when the phone rings and Miyo calls him from the verandah. When he takes the receiver and offers his tentative ‘Moshi-moshi’ he cannot quite identify the woman’s voice.
‘But it’s me,’ she says, switching into French. ‘Don’t you know my voice yet?’
‘You’ve never called me before,’ he says.
‘Do I sound so different on the telephone?’
‘A little, perhaps.’
She speaks to him in Japanese again, the usual mix of Tokyo polite-style and something more direct, more blunt, more definitely Alissa Feneon. She tells him how Junzo came to the house with a book he had promised her (‘one of those impossible volumes of philosophy he always has his nose in’), and how it seemed no one had seen Yuji or heard from him in weeks. Had his winter illness come?
‘Yes,’ says Yuji, ‘it came.’
‘But you have recovered now?’
‘There has been an improvement.’
‘You don’t sound ill.’
‘Would you like to hear me cough?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘I don’t want that, of course.’
There’s a pause. He waits. He cannot begin to imagine why she has called him. He is not even sure where she found his telephone number. Could she have asked Junzo for it?
‘I was going to mention something,’ she says.
‘Yes?’
‘If you would like to go to the kabuki.’
‘To the kabuki?’
‘To see Kasane. Do you know it?’
‘It’s a ghost story,’ he says. ‘Everyone knows Kasane.’
She explains to him that Mrs Yamaguchi, her dance teacher, has been assisting a company of young actors who, though amateurs, are, in Mrs Yamaguchi’s view, both talented and dedicated. Their speciality is the staging of performances in the old style, such as might have been seen in the days of the first Nakamura. They do not, for example, use any electric lighting.
‘I see,’ says Yuji, half fearful this is some sort of game. ‘So it’s kabuki in the old style.’
‘Mrs Yamaguchi will be going. And she has given some tickets to her students. I have two.’
‘Two?’
‘Yes.’
‘To Kasane?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Why do you keep repeating everything?’
‘I’m sorry . .’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says. ‘You’ve been ill. You probably haven’t been speaking to people.’
‘No.’
‘So you’ll come?’
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow!’
‘We could meet at the house at five, then take a taxi. The theatre’s in Tsukiji.’
‘Ah, Tsukiji . .’
‘I thought you might find it amusing, especially as you’ve been unable to leave the house for so long. Aren’t you bored to death?’
What, he wonders, what form of words, would make her understand that he would rather spend the evening grinding chalk between his teeth than go to a student performance of kabuki? Why has she chosen him? What does she want? It is highly irritating that she refuses to translate his hesitation into what it so obviously signifies.
‘At five o’clock?’
‘You could wear a kimono,’ she says, ‘if you think you remember how to.’ And she laughs, a sound like someone throwing petals in his face. He hangs up. Miyo is eavesdropping in the Western room. Haruyo, he supposes, will have heard everything from Mother’s room — Mother too, perhaps. He goes upstairs, lies on his mattress. Is she, perhaps, a little crazy? He has known her since she was sixteen, but other than Garbo, Dietrich, Bette Davis, Vivian Leigh, Danielle Darrieux and a few others, he has no one to compare her with. He has seen other foreign women, of course, has surreptitiously studied them, their height, their high colour, their colourful eyes, their interesting hair, but it is only Alissa he has had any dealings with, just as her father is the only foreign man he has ever spoken to. What is her interest in kabuki? What is her interest in classical dance — a form not even Japanese people take much notice of? Can she not be satisfied with Molíère and waltzes?
Lying there, he is starting to feel pleasantly fatigued again. There is, he assures himself, plenty of time before tomorrow to think of some excuse, some unavoidable commitment he forgot somehow to mention to her. My sincere apologies . . Most awkward . . Most unfortunate . . Another occasion, perhaps? She, who seems to so admire all things Japanese, and who doubtless subscribes to the curious Western theory of Oriental inscrutability, might enjoy a little demonstration of it. He will hide from her in language. He will conceal himself in a smoke of impeccable manners. It would, after all, require nothing more difficult than a passable imitation of Father.
He leaves for the house in Kanda a few minutes after four o’clock. He rides his usual route, but being ill has stripped him of a layer of skin so that the sudden flights of sparrows, the singing of tram cables, sunlight in a gutter, the whiff of, what? — spring mushrooms? — startles and amuses him, diluting a little the exasperated mood he has been in all day, the sense of having been burdened by a ridiculous commitment he has been too dull, too timorous to escape from. His hope now is simply to persuade her to give up the kabuki and come to the cinema instead. There’s a Marcel Carné film at the Montparnasse in Asakusa. He could buy her a coffee, perhaps an ice cream, get her home by nine. If she becomes tedious, argumentative, starts to lecture him on the traditional arts of Japan, he can cough into his sleeve and let go a few deep sickbed sighs. Even Alissa must understand that.
He props his bicycle by the drainpipe, folds his raincoat over his arm, rings the bell. Hanako answers. ‘The master isn’t here,’ she says.
‘Ah . .? But Miss Feneon?’ He would like to add, ‘She called me.’ He would like even Hanako to know he has not simply taken it upon himself to ring the bell without a proper invitation, but before he can speak she has stood aside to let him enter.
He follows her through the house to the kitchen door, the only door — some quirk of Russian architecture? — that gives onto the garden. She stands aside again, stares at him, then drops her gaze. Alissa is under the magnolia tree, reaching into its lower branches, apparently to inspect the buds that line the wood like so many creamy-white candles. For a moment he observes her in silence, her braided hair, her rose kimono tied with an obi of the deepest indigo. Then Beatrice barks and runs over the grass to greet him, sitting at his feet and gazing at him with moist, adoring eyes.
‘She thinks you’ve got something for her,’ says Alissa. ‘She thinks you’re Junzo.’
‘I don’t,’ says Yuji, who thinks it not quite right that a dog should be fed sweets like a spoilt child.
‘I’m sure she likes you anyway,’ says Alissa, taking her stick from where she has hung it over a branch. ‘She’s very forgiving.’
‘Monsieur Feneon isn’t here?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘I told you on the phone, didn’t I? He’s in Yokohama.’
‘Yokohama?’
‘He can’t be here all the time.’
‘Of course.’
‘He has a business to attend to. I’m sorry if you are disappointed.’
He says he is not. They look at each other. Already, he thinks, it’s started, the long evening of embarrassment, but when they go into the house to drink tea she starts to play the hostess, asking him, earnestly, about his health, gently scolding him for not wearing a kimono, and does it all so skilfully, in such a grown-up manner, he is, despite himself, put at ease. The stance he has imagined himself taking, the tone of vexed politeness, has no opening, no chance to emerge. When he tries to say something sarcastic about the failings of student theatricals, it comes out as a perfectly harmless enquiry, one she answers at length, with much enthusiasm.
From in front of the house the taxi sounds its horn. Yuji accepts his coat from Hanako and follows Alissa into the street. They settle into the back of the cab. The driver manoeuvres to the main road past a party of schoolgirls on bicycles, and what looks like a neighbourhood shogi competition, a dozen benches spilling into the middle of the street, young and old sitting astride them, leaning intently over the boards.
He settles back against the frayed leather of the seat, looks out drowsily at the traffic, at the sunlight slanting over the roofs, the evening air in which a golden dust seems to hang, suspended. And as they ride — so slowly they will surely be late — something begins in him, an emotion as sweet as it is painful, and that he cannot, in this perfectly ordinary Tokyo dusk, begin to account for. It is as if he was sitting at the side of a piano on which someone was sounding the same deep note again and again, louder and louder, more and more insistently, until his entire body, the blood itself, vibrated at the exact same pitch. If this is memory then it’s memory as possession — but memory of what? He presses his fist to his lips. Alissa turns to him.
‘I’ve been selfish,’ she says. ‘You are not well yet.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s nothing serious.’
‘Should we turn back?’
‘There is really no need.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘It’s not far now,’ she says. ‘You’ll feel much better out in the air again.’
The theatre is on the corner of a street by the Tsukiji Canal, close enough to the market for a breeze from the bay to carry with it a small stink of fish and fish guts. Yuji, to give himself more time to recover, insists on paying the driver, then walks beside Alissa to the entrance of the theatre. It is not, despite the brightly painted banners over the doors, a place of any great promise, but once they have left their shoes with the attendant and stepped inside, he sees that it is larger than he had imagined, and has, with its scattering of old posters, the age-darkened wood of its beams, the slight confusion of its architecture, something homely and authentic which, despite himself, his mood, the sense of dislocation it has brought with it, touches him with its charm.
They find Mrs Yamaguchi surrounded by her students. She is wearing a kimono of Omeshi silk, and over it a formal coat marked with the crests of the school. To Yuji, though he is certainly no expert, she has the look of a retired geisha, a former Oka-san, perhaps, from one of the older, stricter houses in Shimbashi or the Yoshiwara. Her eyebrows are razored, her hairline neat as if she still wore a wig, though her hair, with its delicate chain of red coral, is, as far as he can tell, her own. Alissa introduces him. The teacher smiles and says, ‘So you are the poet? How wonderful.’ If she laughed, he would not be surprised to find she had blackened her teeth, like the beauties of Grandmother’s day.
The rhythmic wooden clapping of the Ki begins. The inner doors swing wide. They wish each other a pleasant experience, then join the queues filing into the auditorium. The only illumination comes from the pulsing of a half-dozen naked gas flares along the edge of the stage, an uncertain light that leaves large areas draped in shadow, but it does not take long for Yuji to realise that all the seating is in traditional matted stalls and that there is not a single Western-style chair in the whole room. Was Alissa warned of this? How could such a mistake have been made? He turns, stares back to where Mrs Yamaguchi and her students are already settling onto their knees, adjusting their collars, batting their fans. Are some of them watching him, slyly, waiting to see how the ‘poet’ will manage his little difficulty?
The flares are dimmed. The clapping builds to its crescendo. He leans towards Alissa, clears his throat — there is nothing for it but to guide her, as swiftly as possible, out to the foyer again — but she is speaking to him, saying, ‘Here, in here,’ and they shuffle sideways into an unoccupied stall between the aisle and the raised walkway of the hanamichi. She passes him the stick, then, without the slightest visible difficulty, gracefully even, as though easing herself into a hot bath, she kneels. He takes his place beside her. He is still holding her stick, the warm handle. After a moment he lays it carefully on the mat between them.
The last lights gutter, go out. For quarter of a minute the hall is in perfect darkness, then Yuji hears the sound of bodies turning (silk on skin) and turns himself to see, at the back of the auditorium, a candle flame moving in hesitant rhythms along the hanamichi towards the stage, and carrying on its tip the long white oval of an actor’s face. It is not until the flame is almost level with where he is kneeling that Yuji sees how the candle is attached to a long pole and the pole carried by a figure in black who moves in the shadow beyond the candle’s soft bloom of light, stepping back as the actor steps forwards, stopping when he stops. They reach the stage. The shamisen begins to play, a single string plucked with a kind of violence, a sound so sharp, so heavy with nostalgia, the audience lets go a soft collective sigh of grief and pleasure. And in that instant Yuji understands what it was that wrung his heart in the taxi — that his journey with Alissa has unburied the memory of another journey, eighteen, nineteen years ago, when he went with Mother to the Kabuki-za Theatre, just the two of them (Ryuichi must have been with Father or at one of his many school clubs) riding in a rickshaw over the pitted roads of the Low City, crossing Sakura Bridge, crossing Kamei Bridge. He cannot remember the tea house they stopped at. The Kikuoka? He cannot remember which of her kimonos Mother was wearing. He cannot even remember what plays they saw, but what has stayed, what has lain inert all these years waiting for the precise circumstance that would allow it to burn again, is the ecstasy of being pressed against her shoulder, the scent of her, the warmth, the rich serenity of being in exactly the place he wished, above all places, to be. So meagre is his store of such memories — material from the time before — he almost laughs out loud at the luck of coming across it like this on an evening he expected nothing from. It is a victory of sorts. A small defeat for that darkness time drags in its wake.
And in this state he starts attending to the play. He doesn’t care that the theatre is chilly or that his knees are beginning to ache. How skilled the young actors are! How wise of Mrs Yamaguchi to assist them! The shrieks, the bursts of drumming, the sudden stillness, the buffoonery are no longer quaintly antique but a language profound and perfectly evolved. He gives himself up to it — Takao’s murder, Tanizo’s love for Kasane, her transformation into a limping monster — and when the onnagata playing poor Kasane strikes the gesture for pointing to the moon, Yuji is as excited as anyone, and had he known the actor’s name, would have shouted it out along with the others.
It lasts an hour. The next act, following an interval, will be a dance piece, the one which Mrs Yamaguchi presumably has been helping with, but as Alissa stands, Yuji sees her face contort. She leans heavily on the stick, then, after a few seconds, straightens and smiles at him, an apologetic smile that is also sad and somehow coquettish.
‘We could leave now,’ he says.
‘Don’t you want to see the dancing?’
‘Perhaps,’ he says, ‘I’ve had enough for today.’
In the foyer, they find Mrs Yamaguchi again, explain to her how, most unfortunately, they are unable to stay. The teacher nods, turns her eyes from Yuji to Alissa, back to Yuji. She and her students, she says, will be going to the new Chinese restaurant in Shimbashi, once the dancing has finished. Would Alissa and Yuji care to join them? Yuji opens his mouth to answer but Alissa, bowing swiftly, excuses them both. The girls, her fellow students, wave their neat goodbyes. ‘How nice,’ says Mrs Yamaguchi, smiling at Yuji from a face as stiff and white as those on the stage, ‘to meet a friend of Miss Feneon’s.’
They collect their shoes, step into the street. Yuji offers to find a taxi but Alissa says she needs to walk off the stiffness. ‘You’re sure you didn’t mind leaving so soon?’ she asks.
‘I was ready to go.’
‘I think I’ve converted you a little.’
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘a little.’
It’s a night more like mid-May than March. They walk beneath a half-moon, its light in shallow silver pools on the roof tiles of the houses. From the corner of his eye he watches her, wondering if she is still in pain. If she is, she hides it well. She is walking easily now, and with no more than the usual small adjustment to each stride, that slight roll as she settles onto her left foot. A block from the Matsuya, as though by unspoken agreement, they slow, then stop. She adjusts her obi; he glances at his watch.
‘Do you have to go home now?’ she asks. ‘Are you hungry at all?’
He suggests one of the neighbourhood noodle bars, places he has been to at the end of an evening’s drinking with Junzo and Taro, and where a dish of yakisoba costs no more than a tram ride.
‘Or,’ she says, speaking quickly, ‘we could go to the Snow Goose.’
‘The Snow Goose? But isn’t that . .’
‘I have a new pupil,’ she says, ‘a financier of some kind who has fallen in love with Beethoven. He’s twice as old as my other students and at least twice as rich so I charge him twice as much.’
‘You’re good at business,’ says Yuji.
‘I mean,’ she says, ‘it could be my treat. A way of apologising for making you sit through an hour of kabuki.’
Has someone spoken to her about the allowance? Is this financier of hers a fiction, a way of saving his blushes? Should he be offended? He must refuse her offer, of course, that seems clear, though he would, very much, like to go to the Snow Goose, a proper restaurant, an authentic Western-style restaurant he has passed by a hundred times without ever having stepped inside. And if he leaves now, brings the evening to an end, he will have to go and eat in Otaki’s on his own, or take the risk of some icy encounter in the kitchen at home with Haruyo. He studies the toes of his shoes, frowns at the moon, performs in his head the tiresome mathematics of obligation and counter-obligation — though with a foreigner (even one in a rose kimono) the rules are surely different. More lax, more agreeable perhaps . .
‘It seems . . .’ he mutters. ‘I mean, I wonder if . .’
‘Good,’ she says, turning from him and starting to walk again. ‘That’s settled, then.’
The Snow Goose is on the Ginza, opposite the billiard parlour where they celebrated Junzo’s twenty-first birthday. On the front of the restaurant, on the frosted window, a flight of geese are picked out with pieces of golden glass. The doors are open. A doorman pulls back a curtain of red plush. It’s noisy inside, and busy. They have to sit for half an hour on a velvet sofa, then a waiter — a waiter with a blond moustache! — escorts them to a small round table by the wall. He pulls out the table for Alissa, pulls back Yuji’s chair. On the starched linen the cutlery glitters. In the skins of the wine glasses twenty different lights are trembling.
‘I already know what I’m having,’ says Alissa. ‘Its called a Wiener schnitzel. Have you ever had it?’
‘Is it new?’
‘It’s the speciality here. A bit like tonkatsu, though made with veal instead of pork. You should try it. It’s delicious. And we should have a bottle of wine, too — unless you would rather drink something else?’ She picks up the wine list, runs a varnished but unpainted fingernail down the page. ‘I think . . I think Papa might choose this one. A white from Alsace.’
‘Alsace?’
‘They sometimes think they’re German but they’re French really. We don’t have to worry.’
‘Your father said that drinking wine was his duty now. His patriotic duty.’
She nods. ‘He fought the last time,’ she says. ‘He was wounded twice, the second time’ — she touches her breast — ‘a piece of shrapnel just missed his heart. Anyway, there’s no one to fight yet. I mean, they haven’t actually invaded or anything.’
‘Perhaps it will stay like that.’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I suppose it might. The truth is, I mean, between you and me. I worry more about what’s happening on this side of the world.’ She throws a glance to the end of the room where a dozen young officers are drinking together, a party Yuji has already noted, then carefully ignored, not wishing to lock eyes with some drunken lieutenant fresh from Shanghai or the Mongolian border. Other than the waiters the only men in the restaurant not in uniform are at least twenty years older than him.
Alissa orders the wine, the food. She is quite at ease in the Snow Goose, the elaborate etiquette of the place, and when the waiter pours a splash of golden wine into Yuji’s glass she prompts him with her eyes.
‘Oh, yes,’ he says, hurriedly swallowing, ‘it’s quite nice’ though he is perturbed that the wine does not really taste of grapes at all but has, instead, a somewhat surprising flavour of stones.
The waiter fills their glasses, sinks the bottle into an ice bucket, puts the bucket on a tripod next to the table, and with a nod of his blond head, withdraws.
‘What shall we speak now,’ asks Alissa, ‘French, or Japanese?’
‘Why not French for the first half of the bottle, then Japanese for the rest?’
She smiles, agrees, but having chosen a language, they sit in silence, looking at the points of their cutlery.
‘Say something,’ she says at last. ‘Tell me something.’
‘What shall I tell you?’
‘Anything you like. It doesn’t really matter.’
‘Tonight,’ he says, ‘I remembered going on an outing.’
‘Long ago?’
‘I was, perhaps, seven years old. I was with Mother.’
‘A happy memory?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘I don’t even know her name.’
‘Mother?’
‘Yes.’
‘Noriko.’
‘And your father?’
‘Kenji.’ He laughs. Somehow it seems amusing to say Father’s name here. Comically indelicate.
‘Papa’s is Emile.’
He nods.
‘You knew?’
‘It was written inside one of his books.’
‘You’re very fond of him, aren’t you?’
Yuji feels himself reddening. Bien aimer. Bien aimer quelqu’un. ‘He treats me, mm, almost as an equal? He does not assume that what I have to say will be wrong or foolish. He listens to me.’
‘He would have liked to have had a son, I think.’
‘Yes?’
‘He could have shared more with a son.’
‘His business?’
‘That . . and other things, too.’
‘My father,’ says Yuji, ‘is not in the habit of sharing things.’
‘It’s rude of me,’ she says, ‘and please don’t say anything if you’d rather not, but for a long time I’ve wanted to ask you what happened to your father. I know some of it, of course, but it’s all second or third hand, and that’s not much better than gossip. I mean, obviously he’s completely innocent. But I’d like to know what the facts are.’
‘The facts,’ says Yuji, ‘might not be as interesting as the gossip.’ He takes another mouthful of wine, can feel it starting to work in him, to loosen his tongue. He leans towards her a little, his hands folded on the linen. ‘When Father was in his thirties, he published a book, a very long and technical book, on democracy and the constitution. One section, just a few pages, was about the relationship’ — he drops his voice — ‘between the Emperor and the Diet. In Father’s analysis the Emperor is simply another organ of the State. The Diet should take account of his wishes but it is not bound to follow them. Its decisions would be those of a freely elected body. In this way, I think, Father hoped the Emperor could be protected from those elements who might use his authority to justify extreme actions. The book was only read by a few specialists, people like Father. And the atmosphere was quite different then. The criticism didn’t start until after the coup attempt in ’36. They said he was tainted with Anglo-Saxon ideas, that he had failed to recognise the uniqueness of the Japanese situation, that he was a pacifist. I don’t think he took the charges very seriously. He used to tell us they were a symptom of the times and would cease as the times changed. I suppose you could say he misread history, even that he suffered from a certain arrogance.’
‘No,’ she says, ‘I wouldn’t say that. I would say he was principled and courageous.’
‘At the university he became a target for groups like the Black Dragons. His lectures were broken up, his office was ransacked. In the end almost no one would risk speaking up for him. He resigned to protect us, to protect his colleagues. He received no pension, though I suspect he would not have accepted one even if it had been offered.’
‘There was nothing he could do? Nobody he could appeal to?’
‘It’s been worse for others,’ says Yuji. ‘And I, of course, had no position to lose.’
Their food arrives on big white plates, each plate with its piece of breaded meat crowned with a quartered lemon. In the centre of the table the waiter sets a silver dish of fried potatoes, a bowl of steamed rice. ‘Bon appetit,’ he says, a quick smile at Alissa.
‘And your father,’ says Yuji, nervous she will want to go on speaking about his own, that he will be tempted, in this public place, into indiscretions, ‘does he often stay in Yokohama?’
She shrugs. ‘Once or twice a month. We lived there, remember, when we first came to Japan. We still have friends there . . Miss Ogilvy, for example.’
‘Miss Ogilvy?’
‘An American. Actually, we knew her in Saigon. She has a house on the Bluff, with lots of cats.’
‘I only know Americans from the films,’ says Yuji.
‘I don’t think she’s a typical American. I don’t think she’s a typical anything.’
‘But your father stays in her house?’
‘Sometimes. He doesn’t always tell me where he’s going and I don’t always ask. We prefer it like that.’
She forks her lemon, twists the juice from it. They start to eat. To Yuji, though he has used Western cutlery before, the knife and fork feel almost unusably heavy, unusably large, more like weaponry than implements for feeding himself, but the food is good and he eats it gratefully.
‘You must,’ says Alissa, pouring wine for them both and taking them into the Japanese half of the bottle, ‘have wondered about my mother.’
‘I have,’ says Yuji, though this is not exactly true. He has simply assumed that Madame Feneon belongs among the distant dead. There are no pictures of her in the parts of the house he has been in, no fond mementos.
‘It’s not a secret,’ says Alissa. ‘At least, there’s no reason for it to be. Certainly there’s nothing I need to be ashamed of.’
He nods vigorously, suddenly convinced she is about to tell him that the mysterious Miss Ogilvy is her mother. Instead, with a studied nonchalance, she says that she has never met her mother.
‘I mean, I must have glimpsed her in the moments after I was born. At least, I suppose I did, though naturally I can’t remember any of that. Does that count as meeting somebody?’
‘It could, I suppose.’
‘She wasn’t married to Papa or anything like that. She was a sort of companion of his, in Saigon. Probably they met at a dance or something, I don’t really know. There were always lots of parties. Anyway, one day she disappeared. No letter, no forwarding address. Just vanished. Seven months later an old woman came to the house carrying a basket with a baby inside. She gave the baby to one of the servants, a girl called Songlian. She said it was Suzette’s — that was my mother’s name — but that Suzette couldn’t look after it. Papa tried everything to find her of course, but he couldn’t even find the old woman. I stayed with Songlian. I slept with her in the servants’ quarters, was fed by her. One night, in the middle of the night, Papa came and sat beside us. He fanned me with his hat, watched me sleeping.’ She smiles. ‘He says he fell in love with me then and decided he would raise me, openly, as his daughter, though it wasn’t quite as easy as that. All sorts of people made their disapproval clear, the club people, the church people, but Saigon isn’t like here. It’s more chaotic, freer. Here, it would probably have been impossible.’
‘When you were little,’ says Yuji, struggling to make sense of her story, ‘you must have thought the servant was your mother.’
‘Don’t they say a duckling will follow whatever it sees first, even if it’s a dog or a monkey or the farmer’s wife? Later I realised there was something strange about it, though when I asked questions — I spoke good Cantonese by the time I was three — Songlian would only say, “Speak to Papa,” and when I asked him, it was always, “When you’re older.” I was eleven before he told me all this. He sat me down in the kitchen one night, cooked me oeufs en cocotte and poured me my first glass of wine.’
‘You were shocked?’
‘No, I don’t think so. And Papa made it sound as though I was a little girl in a fairy tale, you know, arriving in a basket carried by an old woman who was obviously a sort of good witch. But later I went through a time of wanting, very desperately, to see her, Suzette, I mean. I would look at the women in the market, the ones with children my age, wonder if one of them was her, if she would look up and somehow recognise me. When we came to Japan, of course, that stopped. It was a relief, really . .’
‘And she was French?’ asks Yuji.
‘Not, perhaps, in quite the way Papa is.’
‘No?’ He waits.
‘I have never,’ she says, ‘seen a photograph of her. I don’t think there is one. Papa tells me she was very pretty, that she was tall, that she was a good dancer. My mirror tells me she was also probably mixed race. Don’t you think so?’
She looks at him, her eyes wide with some mute appeal, some silent defiance, and for several seconds they stare at each other until Yuji drops his gaze to his glass. Is this the answer to the riddle of Alissa Feneon? A mixed-race girl? Cautiously, he raises his eyes again. She has turned a little in her seat, turned away as though to make it easier for him to study her. And suddenly he believes he can see it, as though over the bones of her skull she is wearing a score of faces, tissue-thin, and one of these — not the top or the one below or the one below that — but one of them is a face out of the East, an intrusion.
‘I think I’d prefer it if you didn’t tell the others,’ she says. ‘It’s not as if it’s important or anything.’
‘No,’ says Yuji, manoeuvring the remains of his Wiener schnitzel to the edge of his plate. ‘No.’
At the end of the room, the young officers have started to sing. Just two or three at first, but soon the others join in and all of them beat time with their glasses. A glass shatters. Alissa asks Yuji to call for the bill. When it comes (on a little silver salver) she pays with a note from the purse she keeps inside a fold of her obi.
The waiter brings them their coats, helps Alissa into hers. ‘Vous êtes Française?’ he asks.
‘De Saigon,’ she says. ‘Et vous?’
‘Genève.’ He grins at her, the permitted intimacy of a fellow foreigner, then nods to Yuji, holds back the red plush curtain and they leave the Snow Goose with a chorus of ‘Oh! Our Manchuria!‘ ringing in their ears.
On the pavements of the Ginza, the mild air has brought out an evening crowd of strolling couples, office workers, street hawkers, mobile fortune-tellers. Outside a drinking shop (a place that used to be known as the Lenin), the doorman claps his hands for business, while across the street a gang of students are ragging each other noisily in the neon shadows of the billiard parlour.
Yuji has his usual trouble with the taxis, losing out to people who flagged them more aggressively or who, the moment they saw one approaching, sprinted recklessly into the middle of the road. When, at last, he succeeds in stopping one, he takes his place in the back beside Alissa. She gives the driver the address of the house in Kanda. From there — or so he assumes — he will collect his bicycle, make some remarks about how enjoyable the evening has been, about seeing each other at the next meeting of the club, then wave to her and ride home. But when they step down from the taxi and the taxi leaves, she tells him she has something she would like him to see. Would he mind coming inside for a few minutes?
Hanako, who does not live at the house, has long since left. Alissa uses her own key to open the door. In the salon, Beatrice snorts, shakes with excitement. Alissa put on a side-lamp, drapes her coat over the back of the sofa, excuses herself. Yuji waits by the piano. He lifts the lid and touches, but does not depress, a white key at the bass end of the keyboard, then closing the lid, he walks to the half-open door of Feneon’s study.
Through the unshuttered window, moonlight picks out a pattern in the rug and lacquers the familiar edges of things — the bookshelves, the Buddha, the metal lock of the projector box. He glances over his shoulder, then steps inside, performs a quick circuit of the room, swivels the swivel-chair, and made bold by the dark, sits in the chair, resting his palms presidentially on the desk’s broad surface, the thumb-deep slab of bolted mahogany, and decides that the West’s ascendancy — that dominance the generals and admirals seem so personally humiliated by — comes, in part, from the solidity of the objects they surround themselves with, while the Japanese live among what is fragile and evanescent, in homes any man in a moderate rage could pull apart with his bare hands. Would they really, one day, have to fight these pragmatists who long ago put their faith in iron and steel and high explosives? What is this inevitability everyone seems to have agreed to believe in? This urge to lie down together in the fire?
When he hears Alissa, he moves hurriedly away the desk, from the impertinence of sitting where only Emile Feneon should sit. She pauses in the doorway, and before he can apologise to her, she says, ‘I love the smell in here. Don’t you? I’d like to have it in a little bottle so I could take it with me everywhere I go for the rest of my life.’
‘Go? Where would you go?’
She shrugs. ‘Nowhere unless we have to.’
‘But your father has discussed it with you?’
‘Of course.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘You must have assumed it.’
‘You want to go to France?’
‘It’s far too late for that, don’t you think? Back to Saigon. Perhaps Hong Kong. As I said, we won’t go anywhere unless we have to. Japan is my home.’
‘I’m sure,’ he says, ‘there will be no need for you to leave. I’m sure . .’ He tries to think of some phrase, in Japanese or French, that will reassure her, but she says, ‘Let’s not talk about it any more.’ And then, ‘Were you looking for something in here?’
‘What would I be looking for?’
‘I don’t know. The letter perhaps?’
With the light behind her he cannot see her expression, but he recognises the tone of voice, the streak of silent amusement in it. ‘It would,’ he says stiffly, ‘be unforgivable. It would—’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘I didn’t mean . .’
‘No.’
‘Of course not.’
‘But is it here?’
She laughs. ‘Probably. Though it would take us all night to find it. It might even be in the attic. There are boxes and boxes up there.’
‘You’ve really read it?’
‘Years ago.’
‘And you remember nothing about it?’
‘He’s your hero,’ she says, ‘not mine. I prefer Hitomaro.’
‘Hitomaro!’
“‘One morning like a bird she was gone in the white scarves of death. Now when the child whom she left in her memory cries and begs for her, all I can do is lift him and embrace him clumsily.” Isn’t it beautiful? But I was going to show you something,’ she says, ‘unless you’d rather stay here and start looking through the desk drawers?’
He follows her out of the study, then through the salon to the bottom of the stairs. He has never been to the top of the house before, nor, as far as he knows, has any other member of the club. Upstairs was ‘interdit aux élèves’, and though he has been curious about it, has on occasion exercised his imagination on it, he has been content it should remain so, a place apart, a sanctum where the kami sleeps.
Beatrice patters behind them. Alissa sends her back to the salon, then leads Yuji up to the landing, a narrow carpeted corridor where two windows look over the road. On the walls between the windows there are paintings, watery landscapes, a view of a town with tightly winding grey-stone streets.
‘This is Papa’s room,’ she says, opening the door wide enough for Yuji to see the brass bed-end, the big wardrobe, the vitreous gleam of the washstand. ‘And this one,’ she says, passing another door and going ahead to the end of the landing, ‘is mine.’
It is smaller than her father’s room, and almost half of it is taken up by a bed with a muslin canopy, a heaped quilt of ivory satin. At the far end of the room, under the window, is a dressing table littered with hairpins, perfume bottles, spools of ribbon. There are photographs there, too, in various decorative frames, and one of these she picks up, wipes carefully with her sleeve, and holds out to him. He crosses the room and takes it from her. It’s a small, informal picture of a young woman holding in her arms an unsmiling black-haired baby. Behind them is a window, a slatted shutter, the bough of some flowering tree.
‘Songlian,’ she says. ‘Songlian and me outside Papa’s house in Saigon . . I didn’t want you to go home thinking I was one of those girls who makes things up about her life, you know, to make herself more interesting.’
He nods and gives the picture back to her. Did she honestly think he had not believed her, or is she showing him the picture so that he understands, fully, what she was trying to explain to him in the restaurant — that through her mother, through her mother’s mixed blood, she is, in part, an Asian girl? A quarter, an eighth, some fraction of her, not from the grey-stone streets in the painting on the landing but a member of that Great Asian Family the radio keeps lecturing them about. Is this what she wants him to know, to believe? He finds it rather ridiculous, but then, to his amazement, as she turns to replace the picture on the dressing table, he sees his hand reaching up to the back of her head and touching the place where her hair sweeps in a black stream behind one of her ears. She tenses, stiffens as if it was a gun or the blade of a knife he held to her neck, as if the slightest movement might destroy them both. Then she turns and stares at him, searches his face (for some mark of insincerity?), smiles, and sways towards him. They kiss, lightly at first, then more and more deeply.
‘Help me,’ she whispers. She is undoing the pearl-headed clasp of the cord round her obi. He helps her. They work in silence, pulling, tugging at the material. It unravels at their feet, a nest of coiled indigo. She loosens the under-sash. They avoid each other’s eyes now, but she finds his hand and guides it through the crêpe of her under-kimono to where, under the cotton of her slip, her hip and upper thigh are joined.
‘It’s a defect of the joint,’ she says. ‘Probably from my mother’s family. There are no scars, nothing that’s ugly. Nothing to be afraid of. You can look if you like, if you don’t trust your fingers.’ She lifts the hem of her slip. And it’s true. No scars, nothing ugly. Only the blushed white of her skin, the swell of her thigh.
There is a tautness to the moment Yuji finds almost unendurable. He watches his hand (though it hardly seems his) mechanically stroking her thigh. Her mouth is partly open, her long, black lashes lie against her cheeks. It is a face both childlike and lewd, tender, stupid with tenderness and trust. And then, on an impulse that comes from some place in him where violence and desire are equally mixed, he darts his hand to the shadow between her thighs, his whole hand clutching her there, seizing her, so that she folds against him with a sudden sharp cry.
At first he thinks it must be morning, but the light is just the lamp’s flat electric shining, and the room, the house, the world beyond the curtains is wrapped still in some vagary of night, some secretive hour, immense and empty, the dawn’s dawn perhaps. He gazes into the cloud of gathered muslin above the bed, and for a minute he rests at the half-woken ebb of himself and thinks of nothing. Then, when he can do it no more, when nothing starts to fill with remembering, he turns to look at her, her sleeping head on the pillow next to his, her slim bare arm in front of her face, as if to protect it. She is under the ivory quilt, and tried perhaps to get him beneath it too, until, finding it impossible, she dragged the rose kimono from the floor and covered him with that.
He slides out his feet, collects his clothes from different parts of the floor and goes onto the landing. Other than his watch, he is wearing nothing. It is five fifteen exactly. He puts on his clothes. Her stick is leaning against the wall by the bedroom door. He cannot recall her leaving it there. He goes down the stairs. He is afraid Beatrice will start to bark, or worse, far worse, that he will be confronted by Hanako, but the dog only blinks at him from the sofa and there is no sound of servant’s bustle. He turns off the side-lamp, goes into the hall, puts on his coat, his boots. The saddle of his bicycle is wet from a rain shower, though the sky has cleared. He wipes the saddle, wheels the bicycle into the road. Whatever he was before, he is sober now, intensely so, a stark and comfortless sobriety in which the moment he raised his hand to touch Alissa Feneon’s hair appears to him as the most foolish, the most reckless of his life. She tricked him of course, that much is obvious. Kabuki in the old style! But how can he go back, how can he stand in the salon warming his hands at the stove while she is there? And when her father learns of it — as assuredly he will — when he summons Yuji into his study, what then? What decent defence can he offer?
He, whose only wish has been to keep the world from throwing him off, a drop of water from a spinning ball, has now, through his weakness, through something as apparently innocent as curiosity, through the malevolence of fate, through the scheming of a mixed-race girl, undone the last good thing he had. He has betrayed Monsieur Feneon (who wanted a son!), he has scattered his friends; he has lost, irretrievably, his house of life. He peddles, a yell of silent outrage in his wake. Above him, the last stars are fading towards morning.
He considers writing Feneon a letter. Briefly, he considers writing one to Alissa. He has no idea what he could say to either of them. He is sorry? He is angry? He is miserable?
He stays in his room where now and then he laughs out loud, bitterly. He doesn’t care who hears. He has long and elaborate daydreams about volunteering for the army, going to Kanda in his new uniform, saluting smartly at the door of Feneon’s study, then turning on his heel and marching off to certain death. Two days pass, three days, a week. He does nothing. Nothing happens.
He follows old routines, bathes at the customary hour, eats with Father and Miyo, reads, walks in the neighbourhood, performs his few chores. He begins to tell himself he has over-reacted, that his reaction has, in fact, been somewhat hysterical. And why did he assume that Feneon would learn anything? Why should he? From whom? From Hanako? All Hanako could say is that they left for the theatre together in a taxi. Mrs Yamaguchi? She is Alissa’s teacher but not, as far as he knows, an intimate of the family. The only person other than himself who could speak, who could tell everything, is Alissa, and why would she tell her father a story that threw on her such a shaming light?
As for his own part in the affair of that night, each gesture, each sequence and exchange revised in memory many times, it seems to him now he cannot, reasonably, be held responsible for any of it. It was the last of his fever. It was the excitement of recapturing, so unexpectedly, his boyhood outing with mother. It was the wine (the wine Feneon wisely forbids him). And above all, it was her — her wiles, her questionable blood. How many others has she invited upstairs to look at the photograph of her servant foster mother? Was he the first, the tenth, the fiftieth?
Forgetting is a hard art, he knows that (as hard as its apparent opposite) but he starts to fold the memory of that night like a sheet of paper into smaller and smaller squares, imagining, as he does so, Alissa, sitting on the ivory quilt in her room, engaged in the same dogged exercise of the will. And when each of them has folded the paper to its smallest measure, dense as a pellet, tiny enough to hold in a crease of the hand, in one of the fate lines, hidden, then, surely, it will be — almost be — as though none of it ever happened.
How long must he wait? A month? Two? Longer? It would be a mistake to try to go back too soon. But eventually, the end of the spring, say, the beginning of the June rains, he will stand on the step at Kanda and ring the bell, and Feneon, who will have had nothing to forget, nothing to fold, will greet him in the usual way. They will drink a glass of eau de vie. Yuji will explain his absence easily (his health, his mother’s health, even, perhaps, that he has been writing). Then the club will sit on the study floor to watch a hundred shades of grey flicker soothingly over the sheet pegged to the bookshelf. She will be there, of course — she must be if things are to be normal — but she will know how to behave. She will behave impeccably. And after the film they will practise their French in some harmless discussion and the evening will end with laughter, with calls across the dusky street as the club cycles home. He has only to be patient, to be silent, to keep his nerve. The end of the spring, the start of the rains, the first big cloudburst to drum on the roof.
Could it be that nothing has been lost at all?
At Setagaya, he sits on the verandah with Grandfather and Sonoko making bags for the loquats. If the young fruits are not covered while they are still the size of a child’s fingertip, weevils get in and suck out the juices. To make the bags they have on the wood between them a bowl of flour paste, a stack of magazines and newspapers. Sonoko is the most dilligent. Her pile of bags grows quickly, but Yuji’s pile is smaller even than Grandfather’s, for though his fingers are nimble, he is constantly stopping work to peer at a photograph or read a dozen lines of some story, weeks or months old.
One of the pages he pulls from a magazine, then pauses to read, is an account of a tour of Manchuria by a group of ‘notable authors’ invited to see first-hand the great strides made by the new administration in transforming such an antique place into a showcase of Asian modernity. At the bottom of the page, the authors are depicted standing in a line with certain representatives of the military. The most senior authors, the most notable, are in the middle of the line flanked by the highest-ranking officers. Ishihara is there (not in the centre but not at either extreme), dressed in a long leather coat like the one air ace von Rauffenstein wears in La Grande Illusion.
The faces of the writers are mostly smiling, as though the tour was a welcome break from the rigours of composition, the confines of their studies, but the officers’ expressions, shadowed under the peaks of their caps, are set and somehow unamused. Below the picture the caption reads, ‘Forward as one! The pen and the sword link arms.’
‘You want the weevils to beat us?’ asks Grandfather. He takes the page from Yuji’s hand, tears it in two and dips his brush into the paste. ‘Sonoko,’ he says, ‘it seems that Grandson wants the weevils to beat us!’
At home, the doors of the Japanese room are opened wide to the garden, the first time since the previous October. The mats and the woodwork are beaten and wiped. In a corner of the room where the air is touched by sunlight, an insect becomes a fleck of gold.
On the radio, daily bulletins plot the northward progress of the cherry blossom — Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Kyoto, Nagoya. There are also reports of the German advance into Norway, an action intended to protect the Norwegian people from the aggression of the British. Miyo, her hair tied up in a cloth, a duster in her hand, asks Yuji if Norway is close to Japan or as far away as Russia. He shows her the map in the morning paper. She stares at it, then laughs. She cannot explain why. ‘Because . .’ she says, and shrugs and goes on with her work. Is she frightened? Or do the movements of armies, the fall of nations, genuinely amuse her?
A bright Saturday, the second week in April, he goes to the blossom viewing in Ueno Park. He has arranged to meet Junzo, Taro and Shozo under the clock at the subway terminus, but when he arrives there with Miyo, only Taro and Shozo are waiting.
‘Little brother’s sulking about something,’ says Taro. ‘His mystery girlfriend, I suppose.’
The park at ten o’clock is already crowded and it takes them half an hour to find a place for themselves, two yards of unoccupied grass between a group of middle-aged office workers and a circle of young mothers, drowsy, with drowsy babies on their knees. They spread their blankets. Above them, the blossom is so dense that when a breeze blows, the whole head of the tree moves like a single flower. Miyo opens the bento boxes. They eat, picking the food from the little wooden pockets. They have sake with them but after the first cup no one bothers to pour. They watch the passers-by, are watched in turn. Somewhere in the park a van with loudspeakers is broadcasting speeches. Miyo takes out her sewing. Shozo pulls his cap over his eyes. In a quiet voice to Yuji, Taro says, ‘You’ve heard the rumours?’
‘Rumours?’ Yuji’s heart begins to pound. ‘What rumours?’
‘Spies, saboteurs, traitors in high places . . At the ministry it’s all anyone talks about.’
‘I’ve heard nothing,’ says Yuji, hiding his relief in a frown. ‘Is any of it true?’
‘Some, I suppose. I don’t know how much. Anyway, it’s best to be watchful.’
‘Of course.’ Yuji picks a blade of grass. ‘Though what is it exactly we should watch for?’
‘Whatever is out of the ordinary. People who seem to have something to hide. Foreigners . .’
‘Foreigners? Like the Feneons?’
‘Well, the Feneons, that’s different.’
‘If necessary,’ says Yuji, ‘we could speak up for them.’
‘It would be more sensible,’ says Taro, ‘to be discreet.’
‘Then we could speak up for them discreetly?’
‘And who would we speak to? The Tokko?’
‘Why not?’
‘Now you’re being stupid.’
‘Monsieur Feneon’s been here for ten years.’
‘I know all that. But these days it’s not how something is, it’s how it looks. Think of your father’s situation.’
‘Father?’
‘Even an important man like him was not protected.’
‘I am aware of it.’
‘And you are his son.’
‘So?’
‘Nobody is invisible.’
‘It almost sounds like you’re warning me.’
‘I’m saying you should use your head.’
‘And you?’
‘Yes,’ says Taro, nodding slowly. ‘More than you perhaps.’
They sit together, silently, as though on the brink of some sharp exchange neither is quite ready for, not today, not here in the open. Yuji flicks the rolled blade of grass away and gets to his feet. ‘I’m going to walk,’ he says. ‘You want to come?’
Taro shakes his head. ‘I’ll stay,’ he says. ‘Shut my eyes for a while.’
Alone, relieved to be alone, Yuji thinks first of heading towards the pond (‘In the dream of a city poet, electric dragonflies over Shinobazu Pond.’), then finds it easier to simply fall in with the movement of those around him, the aimless swirling of boots and wooden sandals, silken sleeves, epaulettes, piled hair, cigarettes, parasols. Only a man in tattered leggings hunkered in the shade of a stripped windbreak, one of the hundred or more who sleep in the park, who scavenge in the bins and grow beards like Chinese sages, seems to Yuji independent of the crowd and the crowd’s enormous slack mind. He watches him, admires the steadfast gaze, the immobility, then sees on the rising grass beyond him a woman’s back wrapped tightly in unpatterned water-green silk. He grins, almost calls out to her, but stops himself and circles cautiously until he is sure the old woman is not about to descend.
‘I hope you haven’t been following me,’ she says, as he walks up to her.
‘How could I? I had no idea you were coming today.’ He points to the tea tray in her hands, the two cups. ‘Have you lost her?’
‘I’m sure this is where I left her, though now it seems she has vanished.’
‘She will have met a friend,’ says Yuji, ‘and the friend has taken her to meet another friend.’
‘Someone with a lot of grandchildren, perhaps?’
‘Lots of grandchildren and lots of interesting ailments.’
‘So now I’m waiting for her like a servant,’ says Kyoko, turning her smile into a pout. ‘What a nice way to spend my day off.’
‘Did you arrange a meeting place?’
‘The usual,’ she says.
‘The statue? I could carry the tea for you.’
She bites her lip, throws him a hard glance, but lets him take the tray from her hands and follows him as he steps into the current of the crowd again. Soon he’s making her laugh with his muttered commentary on the blossom-viewing parties, the over-ripe wives, the shrunken husbands, the red-faced children chasing each other bawdily between the trees. A holiday crowd more akin to the big-thighed clay manikins unearthed from Yayoi sites (grainy pictures of them in Father’s books) than the race of ‘warrior gods’ the vans with the loudspeakers are shouting about in the distance, though this last thought, mindful of his talk with Taro, mindful too that he is in the company of the wife of an acting corporal in the Kwangtung Army, he keeps to himself.
‘I heard you were ill,’ she says.
‘Who told you that?’
‘Who do you think?’
‘Who told her?’
‘Who do you think?’
He nods. He would like to know what else Haruyo tells the old woman. That she heard him make arrangements to go to the kabuki with the foreign girl? That she heard the front door slide open at six the following morning?
‘I’m well now,’ he says.
‘That’s good.’
‘Any news from over the water?’
‘A photograph.’
‘Another new coat?’
‘A coat? No,’ she says. ‘It’s not that sort of photograph.’
He waits for her to explain what kind it is but she doesn’t. He has heard of soldiers sending pictures home of prisoners or even of the enemy dead. Some girls, it was said, carried such pictures as love tokens.
‘What will you do now?’ she asks.
‘Now that I’m well?’
‘Yes.’
‘I have lots to do,’ he says.
‘You’ve found a job?’
‘Not exactly a job.’
‘Grandmother says that soon everyone will be forced to work. In factories, digging shelters . .’
‘Shelters? In Tokyo?’
‘It might be good for you to do some digging. That kind of work can soothe the nerves.’
He glances across at her. Is that what she would like to see? Him wielding a mattock, excavating some great hole under the city, choking on the dust?
‘As I told you,’ he says, ‘I’ve got plenty to do. You’ve heard of Kaoru Ishihara, I suppose?’
‘Mother Behind my Eyes?’
‘Yes. Blood of Honour, The Last Stand. I’ve been commissioned to write a piece on him. A critical essay for Young Japan.’
‘On the train,’ she says, ‘I’ve seen some of the junior officers — the more serious ones — reading Young Japan.’
‘It will be quite an important piece. Literary but also political. Different dimensions and so on.’
‘You must be pleased,’ she says. ‘You could really make a name for yourself.’
‘It’s the sort of thing,’ says Yuji, ‘I’ll be doing a lot more of now. I’m afraid the shelters will have to wait.’
‘Of course.’
At the statue of Saigo Takamori there is, happily, no sign of Grandma Kitamura, though a dozen others are stood there, women and children mostly, looking out expectantly for some familiar face to blossom suddenly among the ranks of strangers.
‘The tea will be cold,’ says Yuji.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says.
He turns and gazes up at the bronze samurai and his faithful dog. ‘Did you know,’ he says, ‘that after the Great Earthquake people used this statue as a noticeboard? It was covered with the names of the missing. A name, the last known location, the address of the family, sometimes a photograph or a sketch. It was the same with the statue of Kusunoki Mosashige outside the palace.’
‘I hadn’t heard that,’ she says, and he can see, as she joins her gaze to his, that she’s imagining it, the way it must have looked with hundreds of little pieces of paper fluttering on its sides. He, too, of course, must imagine it, for by the time he returned from Uncle Kensuke’s most of the notices were gone, though some, yellowing and torn, stayed up stubbornly for a month or more, until the autumn winds released them. Where Father posted Ryuichi’s name he has no idea, but he points to a spot halfway up the plinth and tells her it was there.
‘If it troubles you to wait here . .’ she says, a voice more tender, more intimate than any he has heard from her before.
‘Thank you for your thoughtfulness,’ he says, ‘but I have been here many times. It no longer . .’
‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘might it be better if you left before Grandmother arrives?’
He nods, hands her the tea tray. ‘It was nice to meet you today,’ he says.
‘I am glad you are well,’ she says. ‘Please have good luck with your new work.’
He thanks her again and leaves. He does not look back. He is afraid he will see a boy in a high-collared uniform, white gloves on his hands, crouching at the warriors’ sandalled feet. He is afraid that if he turns the boy will leap down and pursue him through the park, enraged, swift as a fox.
As the embarrassment of doing the piece is now outweighed by the shame that would follow from not doing it, from being discovered as a liar, a fantasist, a person who should immediately be sent to dig shelters beneath the streets of Tokyo, he calls Makiyama’s office and leaves a message with Kiyooka that he would, if it is still possible, if he has not left it too late, be grateful to accept Mr Makiyama’s generous suggestion of a study of Kaoru Ishihara.
‘By the way,’ drawls Kiyooka, ‘we have one of your socks here. Perhaps you would like to collect it?’
At the dining table in the Western room he reads an account of the German Army’s capture of Copenhagen. This time there is no attempt to claim that the action was intended to protect the inhabitants from an aggressor. The Danes have simply been absorbed into the Reich. The audaciousness of the attack, the speed with which both the city and the country have been conquered by small forces of determined soldiers, is a lesson, so the author of the article suggests, the Japanese military will surely wish to profit from.
He folds the paper (which today has a special supplement on patriotic recipes) and looks into the garden at Miyo crouching on the path beside the bamboo. What is she doing there? The door onto the verandah is open. He goes outside and crouches beside her. She points into the heart of the bamboo, the little depression where the cat made its nest. He cannot see anything at first — the ground there is densely striped with shadow. Then he notices the death-shrunken form of a kitten, and nearby, partly buried under the pale leaves, a second.
‘Did none survive?’ he asks.
She puts a finger to her lips.
The day before the Emperor’s birthday, Yuji cycles to the Kanda bookstalls to buy second-hand editions of Ishihara’s novels. In warm streets under a faultless sky even Yuji with his old habits of self-care, his sick-boy’s caution, is dressed for the good weather — open-neck shirt, flannel trousers, canvas shoes.
To find Ishihara’s books will be easy enough. The people who read him are not collectors. When the story has been read the book is empty, used up. Those who can be bothered dispose of them for a few sen at the stalls. The rest leave them under their seats in the subway or on the luggage racks of trains, where they become part of the city’s unofficial circulating library.
On Ooka’s stall half a dozen of the books are on prominent display, but Yuji does not want to explain himself to Ooka, who will certainly try to make a joke about this new and unexpected interest. He slides past to Shinkichi’s stall. Shinkichi is a sullen man who does not enter into conversation with his customers. He buys Song of Death, The Last Assault, Tears of a Hero, Blood and Beauty, Mother Behind My Eyes. Each of them has some wild illustration on the cover. A pair of schoolboys splashed in their own gore, gazing at each other passionately in the moment of death. A pair of samurai with gaping wounds, gazing at each other admiringly in the moment of death. A grieving mother kneeling under a rain of blood . .
Shinkichi makes a parcel of the books. Yuji hangs the parcel from his handlebars. He has what he came for but cannot quite resist going the ten yards to Yoshimasu’s stall to look there (under the guise of general browsing, of an idle and utterly carefree examination of the stock) for that unloved edition of Electric Dragonfly.
Has someone bought it? Has the pretty girl Ooka laughed about taken it home with her, where even now she is lying on the mats of her room reading it aloud to herself while a drop of tea slides from the rim of her cup to leave a perfectly neat little splash on the page? He rests the bicycle’s crossbar against his belly, starts to flick through the piles. There are volumes here, armfuls of them by people he has never heard of, young poets who, no doubt, considered themselves on the cusp of a brilliant career, then found they could not fly again. What became of them? Where have they gone? What becomes of those who have ceased to promise?
Around him the day suddenly darkens, as if at the passing of some large and unpalatable truth, but the moment is fleeting, the sunlight falls on the back of his neck again, and when he finds Electric Dragonfly in its pristine cover (a line-drawn dragonfly, a lily pad) he silently greets it, lifts it deftly to the top of the pile, and turns away, wheeling his bicycle through the crooked corridor between the stalls.
At the end of the street, he hesitates, looks in both directions, then climbs into the saddle and rides towards the Russian Cathedral. It is not the way home, certainly not the most direct way, but the route will lead him past Feneon’s house. The unwisdom of this, the untimeliness, is perfectly evident to him, but makes no difference. He brakes as the house comes into view, freewheels past the shut front door, his heart like a stone in his throat. What did he expect? That Feneon would be sitting on the doorstep looking out for him? Or Hanako waiting with a message — ‘Everything is understood, everything is excused. Please come back’?
He stops outside the fan shop, looks over his shoulder. Should he ride past again, keep riding up and down until at last someone comes out? At his side, in the shade of the shop’s awning, a little girl is playing with a doll. She tells Yuji the doll’s name, holds it out to him, the grubby wood of its limbs, the painted blue eyes. He nods to her and rides away.
That night he has another fire dream, unforeseen, unseasonable. In the dream he finds Dr Kushida cross-legged on a pile of corpses, his skin flaking from him like the skin of a grilled fish. Miss Feneon, says the doctor, has a message for him. She is out there somewhere (he waves a ruined hand). Yuji must search for her before it is too late. ‘Look at your watch,’ says the doctor, then sighs and settles back on the corpses as the flames creep over him like red and blue vermin.
Yuji wakes. He gropes his way off the mattress, reaches up for the light. His watch is lying as a bookmark inside Tears of a Hero. He takes it out and squints at it. Ten to four! Ten minutes to find the boy. Ten minutes before the fire falls. Ten minutes to be ready.
And what message could she possibly have that should delay him?