One Morning Like a Bird

1

Ishihara’s house is in the southern suburb of Azabu. It is not easy to reach and for the last part of his journey Yuji has been forced to the expense of a taxi, the young driver taking several wrong turns before arriving on a tree-lined street, a place half rustic, half genteel, with nothing to disturb the singing of birds and insects except a small party of children playing soberly in the care of a servant.

Outside the gate, in the partial shade of a tree, is a large, brilliantly polished car, an Armstrong Siddeley (the new six-cylinder Merton model) with tan leather seats, walnut dashboard, headlights under peaks of chromed steel. Yuji tidies his hair in the glass of the car’s rear window, then tries the garden gate. It’s locked. He looks for a bell but finds instead a cabinet at the side of the gate with the end of a speaking tube inside. How does one begin with a speaking tube? He utters his name into the mouthpiece, listens to the hissing of air, closes the cabinet and waits. After several minutes a bolt is drawn and a man two or three years Yuji’s senior stands in the gateway, the expression on his face suggesting he has been needlessly disturbed from important work. He is dressed in a finely cut lightweight suit. His hair is cropped like a soldier’s and there’s a small scar by his right eye but he’s as pretty as an onnagata. In reply to Yuji’s bow he says he is Ota, Ishihara’s personal secretary, then, saying nothing more, he shuts the gate and leads Yuji around the side of the house — a two-storey building in a style not quite indigenous, not quite not — to the garden at the back. Here, the land slopes gently down to a pavilion in the shade of a purple-flowering sandalwood tree. All the pavilion’s screens are open, and on the far verandah a man, stripped to the waist, is vigorously wiping his chest with a cloth. On the wood by his feet is a set of barbells.

‘Sensei!’ calls Ota. ‘The journalist is here.’

‘Who? Oh, he’s not really a journalist,’ says Ishihara, crossing the mats towards them and smiling at Yuji. ‘I’m not sure I would have invited a mere journalist to join us today. Mr Takano is more of a . . literary gentleman.’ He laughs, still rubbing himself with the cloth. ‘Won’t you come inside?’ To Ota he gives orders for tea to be brought out. ‘I only drink Ceylon tea,’ he says to Yuji, ‘and in the English way, with lemon and a little sugar. I hope that suits you? I find it helps my concentration.’

Yuji takes off his shoes and steps into the pavilion. Ishihara picks up a silk shirt the colour of persimmon leaves, puts it on and begins, with slender fingers, to button it. He apologises for not being ready to receive a guest. Yuji apologises for disturbing him.

‘You’ll be staying for lunch, of course?’ asks Ishihara.

‘Lunch?’

‘Just a few of us — Major Yamazaki from the War Ministry; Dick Amazawa, a director with the Shochiku film company; Ota; and you. And you needn’t worry. I haven’t invited our mutual friend, though he speaks rather highly of you. He was quite excited at the thought of your writing a really in-depth piece, quite persuasive.’ His shirt is buttoned now. He lights a cigarette, exhales slowly. ‘So, how shall we begin?’

‘However you prefer,’ says Yuji, who, as he crossed the city, had nothing more precise in mind than that he would scribble frantically into the pad he has in his pocket while Ishihara made some sort of speech about himself.

There is a playful grin on Ishihara’s face. ‘You’re a writer,’ he says. ‘I’m sure you can read a man’s character in the objects he surrounds himself with. This is where I work. It’s what the Americans would call a “den”. Feel free to explore. I shan’t disturb you.’ He turns and goes again to the far verandah with its view across the ample roofs of neighbouring houses, the heads of trees luminous in their fresh May foliage. For a few seconds Yuji stands regarding the other’s back and wondering what exactly he is being tested on. His skill as a writer (if that is what he is)? Or something else, something less obvious?

He starts to look. The pavilion — the den — seems more a place for relaxation, for pleasure, than for the hard, anxious business of writing. At one end, there is a desk of glass and tubular steel, a chair of steel and leather, but the typewriter on the desk seems as ornamental as the vase of white lilacs beside it. There is not, in fact, any paper to be seen.

At the other end of the room, under a raised and tied mosquito net, is a divan upholstered in peach silk, and on the mats beside it a scattering of magazines — Vogue, Jardin des Modes.

Bookshelves (coloured glass) hold mainly copies of Ishihara’s own works, though with some unexpected additions: volumes of history and economics, like Shigeo Iwanami’s Lectures on the Historical Development of Japanese Capitalism, the same edition Father keeps in the garden study. On the wall between the shelves is a large photograph of Ishihara with an older man, the pair of them muffled in winter coats and standing in front of a monument Yuji has seen before but cannot quite identify.

‘The Brandenburg Gate,’ says Ishihara, who has stepped quietly in from the verandah, ‘Berlin. That’s Kyushi Hiraizumi. It was my thirty-fifth birthday. I am, as you should know, almost exactly as old as the century.’

‘So you’ve been to Europe?’

‘Berlin, Paris, London, Vienna . . even to the Eternal City.’

‘The Eternal . .?’

‘It is what they call Rome. Do you think you would like to see Rome?’

‘Yes.’

‘Perhaps you will.’

‘I’ve hardly travelled at all.’

‘You are still young.’

‘But the way things are going, the international situation . .’

‘The way things are going will give many excellent opportunities to adventurous young men. You needn’t worry about that. But is this what you want to talk about? The international situation? I suppose the author of Electric Dragonfly cannot have a very high opinion of my little efforts with the pen.’

‘Not at all,’ says Yuji, ‘I was only . .’

“‘In the dream of a city poet, electric dragonflies over Shinobazu Pond. The lilies open like distant gunfire.” Have I got it right? I hate to misquote.’

‘Yes,’ says Yuji, blushing and looking down at Ishihara’s naked toes. ‘It’s correct.’

‘The problem,’ says Ishihara ‘— and you don’t object, I hope, to our speaking freely? — is that people now prefer stronger flavours. Or to put it another way, it is the tastes and appetites of the popular classes that dominate our society, as they dominate societies all over the world. Your poetry, Takano, belongs to a more elegant age, the time, perhaps, of our grandfathers or great-grandfathers. It is over. It will not return.’

‘So poetry is finished?’

‘Have you ever stood outside a factory and seen the workers streaming out of the gates the moment the steam-whistle sounds? I recommend it if you want a view of the future. A featureless crowd, semi-educated, longing for some distraction from the harsh reality of their lives. By their mid-thirties they’re exhausted. Do you think they read much poetry? Indeed, do you think they read at all?’

‘Then what hope is there for your own . . work?’

‘None whatsoever.’

‘So . .?’

‘What shall we do?’ He lights another cigarette, flicks, with a frown, a speck of ash that has settled on the cuff of his shirt. ‘What else but side with history? With the future. I wonder if you know what that means.’

‘Siding with the crowd?’

‘I’ve heard,’ says Ishihara, ‘that you care for cinema.’

‘Yes.’

‘And your favourite film?’

‘La Grande Illusion.’

‘Shall I tell you mine? Ah, but here is our tea.’

Ota places the tray on the verandah, pours from a silver teapot, throws Yuji a glance of rich hostility, nods to his employer, and withdraws.

Ishihara hands Yuji a cup. ‘Don’t worry about Ota,’ he says. ‘He is somewhat possessive, that’s all. Now, take a sip and tell me what you think.’

‘It’s very good,’ says Yuji.

‘Just the right degree of stimulation?’

‘Yes,’ says Yuji. ‘But I think you were about to tell me the name of your favourite film?’

‘It does not have a name. I saw it privately at General Sugiyama’s house. It was filmed by one of the general’s aides and lasts no more than a few minutes. It shows a battlefield in Shangtung Province. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of dead soldiers, ours, theirs, lying where they had fallen a few hours earlier. The beauty of it is . . beyond my poor powers of description. Their gestures, their stillness, their wounds, their youth. I was filled with an emotion that goes far beyond patriotism or pity, or even terror. A voluptuous sensation, an ardour that no poem or novel or song could have inspired in me. I stood. I leaned towards the images on the screen. I longed to be there!’

‘And this is what the masses want to see?’

‘Oh, probably they do. In a diluted form at first, and dressed up a little. But that is not quite the point I am making.’

‘If you are arguing that cinema is the pre-eminent form, the form of the future, I suppose I must agree.’

‘But would you agree that the future is not simply the depiction of such scenes — a depiction that must indeed be cinematic — but the scenes themselves?’

‘War?’

‘Yes, war. But more than that.’

‘More?’

‘It is the imaginative aspect, the aesthetic aspect, even, dare I say, the religious aspect.’

‘A worshipping of war?’

‘Not exactly war,’ he laughs, ‘but you are getting close. Do you think you’ll remember all this? Perhaps you have a little notebook in your pocket you could use. You see, I am putting myself into your hands. I hope I have not made a mistake?’

Lunch is in the house, an upstairs room where double doors of decorative glass open onto a balcony overlooking the garden. The lunch guests are already seated by the time Yuji and Ishihara join them. The table is as formal, as cluttered, as the tables at the Snow Goose. There are vases of flowers, bouquets arranged in the Western style, and on the walls four or five large paintings, black-and-white abstracts, some kind of Japanese constructivism. Ota is pouring glasses of Monopole champagne. Major Yamazaki is sketching thrusts and dispositions on the starched linen of the tablecloth with the handle of his fork: ‘Naturally I accept the need for a showdown with the Soviets, but the country needs fuel oil — the navy’s using four hundred tons of the stuff every day — and that means pushing to the south.’

Yuji is given a seat beside Dick Amazawa who, paying no attention to the major’s lecture, is leaning heavily on his elbows in a crumpled suit of yellow and white striped linen. There is a woman with him in a short gingham dress who chain-smokes throughout the meal, the food on her plate untouched. To Yuji, Amazawa confides that he has not slept in two weeks. His doctor gives him pills to help him stay awake. He has been awake so long he’s afraid to sleep now. ‘Aren’t you some sort of writer?’ he asks.

‘Well,’ says Yuji, ‘I suppose.’

‘You’re going to work in the Unit?’

‘The unit?’

‘He hasn’t told you about the Unit?’

‘No.’

‘But you want to work in cinema?’

‘Yes, perhaps.’

‘Who do you like?’

‘Renoir, Ford. Ozu . .’

‘Hitchcock?’

‘The Man who Knew Too Much.’

‘Murder!’

‘The Lady Vanishes.’

‘Imagine a film that’s just a woman screaming. The whole film. Just that.’

‘It’s difficult to imagine.’

‘That’s because you sleep too much. Have some of these. I’ve got more than I can use. More even than she can use.’

The woman blinks, a lizard on a stone. Amazawa takes a handful of brownish-pinkish tablets from his pocket, eats one, and drops the rest in the pocket of Yuji’s jacket. From across the table Ishihara is smiling at Yuji as though they alone understand that the afternoon is a kind of game, an elegant charade, something to divert themselves with until the serious business of welcoming the future becomes possible.

The houseboy serves the coffee. The major, face to the ceiling, is snoring in his seat, a piece of tomato from the cuttlefish ‘à la française’ dangling from a corner of his moustache. Yuji excuses himself and stands.

‘Ota will drive you,’ says Ishihara.

‘Really, there is no need,’ says Yuji.

‘What is the point in keeping a car,’ smiles Ishihara, ‘or even a personal secretary, if one doesn’t use them?’

Bowing, Yuji begins to thank him. Ishihara cuts him off with a movement of his hand. ‘Until next time,’ he says. ‘Until our next little meeting.’

Outside, the sun is dancing off the curves of the big car. Ota holds open the rear door, every gesture of servility carefully deranged to express its opposite. They drive in silence, the car rocks expensively on its springs. As they pass the Yasukuni shrine, Yuji, who certainly does not wish to arrive outside his house in such a car, to be seen by Father (to be seen by someone), asks to be dropped. He has, he says, some business in the area. Would it be convenient . .? Ota says nothing. The car rolls to a halt. Yuji gets out. The instant he has closed the heavy door, the car moves off. Yuji watches it, waits until it is out of sight, then unbuttons his collar and begins to walk. He wonders where the nearest tram-stop is. He wonders, too, whether, when he comes to write the article, he should mention the fact that all the men at the lunch had in their lapels the same ruby-headed pin he saw Makiyama wearing in the Don Juan.

2

Wisteria, azaleas, peonies. The first mosquitoes, the first bites . .

On 10 May the radio announces that all stores will henceforth be prohibited from carrying non-essential merchandise. Zen monks, in recognition of the rice shortages, vow to live on nothing but fruit and vegetables. Citizens are ordered to sell their gold to the government. Soon there are stories of people hiding their gold watches and buying chrome ones to wear instead.

In China, the army suffers heavy casualties in its advance on the Nationalist capital at Chunking. The brush-maker puts up his shutters. His son is among the missing. In Europe, German tanks sweep into France. After four days the battle already looks lost, soldiers and civilians fleeing along clogged roads. (And what is Feneon doing? What is he thinking? Does this disaster not justify a visit? Does it not require it?)

The nineteenth is Yuji’s birthday. He goes with Taro and Junzo to the Ginza. They visit the Black Pearl, but not the Don Juan, the billiard parlour, but not, of course, the Snow Goose. By midnight the question is what to do with Junzo. Yuji has never seen him like this, not even on his twenty-first, when he was babbling about ‘spineless intellectuals’ until he tripped down the steps to the toilet and had to be carried home by his brother. When he hears about Yuji’s lunch with Ishihara, he immediately wants to take a taxi to the Azabu Hills. ‘At least we can break a few windows, eh? At least we can do that.’

He pulls at Taro’s arm. Taro shakes him off. ‘What,’ says Taro, ‘do you suppose would happen if we were caught? You would be thrown out of Imperial, I would be finished at the ministry, and Yuji would lose any hope of finding a respectable job.’

‘Perfect!’ cries Junzo. ‘Don’t you see that’s the best that could happen to us?’

A group their own age come into the hall, and though out of uniform it’s obvious — the shaved skulls, the sediment of fatigue in their faces — they’re all off-duty soldiers. Junzo leaps to attention, salutes them. They come over. Taro tries to calm things down while Yuji hustles Junzo through the back door into the yard. The door swings shut. Side by side they urinate against the bins, blue neon above, then stars.

‘Let me congratulate you,’ says Junzo.

‘On becoming an old man?’

‘I just hope you’re not going to be an idiot.’

‘Idiot? What about you? Those soldiers would have—’

‘Just don’t be an idiot,’ says Junzo. ‘And please take care of yourself. Please take care of—’

‘Are you getting sentimental?’

‘You’re right,’ says Junzo, buttoning his trousers. ‘I should probably despise you, but somehow I can’t. So instead, let me congratulate you. Toutes mes félicitations! Au vainqueur, le gloire!’

‘La gloire.’

‘La gloire. .’

Taro comes out. ‘Their friends have arrived. Now they want to show us how things are done across the water. Let’s go.’

The door out of the yard is locked. They clamber over the wall, drop into the alley behind, then run past the shack-like backs of restaurants, past dog-fences and silent birdcages hanging from the eaves of unlit houses. They come to a railway line. Before they can cross it a bell starts clanking. They crouch, wait. The train lays down a bitter scent of coal, but when they run into the streets the other side, the air is fragrant with night flowers blooming on countless rooftop gardens. Are the soldiers after them still? There are no cries of pursuit, no hurrying feet. They hear water and walk onto a bridge over a canal. Below them, tethered boats shift in the current. They lean on the parapet. Taro lights a cigarette. Junzo seems to have sobered up, though Yuji doubts he was ever quite as drunk as he pretended to be (and what did he mean, ‘au vainqueur?’ Did he know what he was saying?). They start to laugh about the soldiers, go on laughing even when the joke’s exhausted. None of it matters now. They have had an adventure. They are unscathed. It is like old times. And suddenly it feels immensely pleasurable to be standing together on the warm stones of a bridge in the heart of the Low City, this Year of the Dragon, immensely pleasurable, immensely precious. Then Taro blows out a last lungful of smoke, flicks away his cigarette. The ember arcs over the water, an early firefly.

Then gone.

3

It is only because the front door is open that he manages it at all. If he had to ring the bell and stand there waiting, he would, he is sure, simply run away before the door was answered. He approaches slowly, creeping up behind the steadily falling rain. Hanako is in the hall wiping the tiles with a cloth. When she sees Yuji, she looks up, startled, then nods and gestures with the cloth towards the salon. Yuji shakes his umbrella, folds it, takes off his rubber boots, his raincoat.

In the salon, Feneon is alone. He is sitting on the piano stool in his shirtsleeves, his braces hanging down from the waistband buttons of his trousers. There is two or three days’ growth of stubble on his face. His feet, by the piano’s brass pedals, are bare.

‘I can’t play it,’ he says. ‘None of her talent could have come from me.’ He sounds a note with the edge of finger, smiles, then turns and squints at Yuji as if they were much further away from each other than they are. ‘I thought you two would have come together. I hope you haven’t fallen out.’

‘Fallen out?’

‘Had a row.’

‘Row?’

‘A dispute.’

‘But with whom?’

‘With Junzo. He left ten minutes ago.’

‘Junzo was here?’

‘He plays the clown but underneath he takes it all terribly seriously, don’t you think? You’re a much more carefree fellow. It’s all that German philosophy he studies. I can think of nothing more detrimental to a young man’s health. Philosophy was invented by the Greeks as a guide to good living. Then the Germans got hold of it and made it joyless. Better off spending his time in a bordello. Women there can teach you a great deal. Live with their eyes open, not just their legs.’ He chuckles to himself, shakes his head. ‘Fancy a drink? Or don’t you, in the morning?’

The urge to flee, to splutter some excuse and get out, is very strong. He has never seen Feneon like this before. He is drunk, of course, or almost drunk, but that would be tolerable — it might even be exciting — if the disarrangement of mind that made the first drink necessary was not so disturbingly plain. He clears his throat. He has a little speech prepared but when he starts (listening all the while for the opening or shutting of a door, the approach of footsteps), he finds himself quite unable to manage the language with his usual assurance.

‘I am . . I wish, monsieur . . I wish to say how profoundly . . how the unfortunate events . . the suffering, naturally. And all those who revere a great culture, and I, who have been inspired. And you, monsieur, who, with great consideration, most generously, with the Japanese people—’

‘My dear little Frenchman!’ says Feneon, standing and clapping Yuji’s shoulders. ‘My dear, dear little Frenchman. You’re going to drink wine with me! Here, I’m going to start you off at the deep end. This is a Saint Emilion, and a pretty good one. Take your time with it. Give it a good sniff. Now, roll it over your tongue. Slowly, slowly . . It’s the last case. There won’t be any more until the Boche go home, though what they can’t drink they’ll try to carry with them. There must be cellars the length and breadth of the Reich full of good French wine from the last time they visited.’

‘France has not yet surrendered, monsieur.’

‘You’ve seen the pictures in the paper. Storm troopers on the Champs-Élysées! Another week, two at most . .’

He sits at the piano again and stares at the keys as though their surface is a riddle staring might solve. ‘I’ve been dreaming,’ he says, ‘one I haven’t had in years. A memory as much as a dream. Woods near Noirceur. A place we advanced and retreated through a dozen times in the summer of 1917. I was on my own one evening bringing up a sack of loaves for the company. Somehow, I lost the path and wandered into a small clearing where a soldier was sitting with his back against the trunk of a tree. He must have been there for months. There was no flesh on him. His uniform was so black with rot you couldn’t even say which army he was from. What made me stop and take a closer look was his boot, just the one, standing in the grass beside him like a tombstone. My first thought was that he must have been taking off his boots when he was hit, that he had been marching all day dreaming of the moment he would sit down and let the air at his feet. It even seemed slightly amusing, the idea of him planning his little rest and suddenly starting a much longer one. Then I saw his rifle in the grass, the muzzle pointing towards him, and I realised the reason he had taken off his boot was so he could press the trigger with his toe.’

‘And you dream of him?’

‘He talks to me. Whispers things I would rather not hear.’

‘I have dreams about fire,’ says Yuji.

Feneon nods. ‘You’ll have more of those before this is over.’

In the garden, the leaves of the magnolia are trembling in the rain, the last of the white petals scattered in the grass. Is this the moment to take his leave? He has been fortunate, but how long before they are interrupted? He swallows a last large mouthful of wine (such a heavy, soporific drink) and is looking for somewhere to put the glass when Feneon begins to speak again.

‘I try to imagine,’ he says, ‘how it is for her. She’s never even been to France. It’s just a story, a few pictures. What can it mean to her, a country she’s never seen?’ He shakes his head. ‘I should have taken her, even only for a month or two. It would have helped her, I think. But somehow . .’ Once more he sounds a single note, waits as it melts into the air. ‘I’m afraid if you were hoping to see her, you’re out of luck. She went out a few minutes before Junzo arrived.’

‘She could not have known.’

‘What?’

‘That I was coming here.’

‘You might have a daughter yourself one day.’

‘Me?’

‘Or a son.’

‘A son!’

‘Well, why not? Didn’t you tell me you almost got married once?’

‘Yes. Once.’

‘Life is full of the unexpected, Yuji. Anyone who thinks they know what’s going to happen is a bloody fool. What’s that saying you have? “When men talk of the future, devils laugh.”’

Yuji nods. ‘It is one of Grandfather’s favourite sayings.’

‘The great pickle-maker? I’d like to meet him one day. I always think you’re more impressed by him than by your father.’

‘Perhaps Father is not so impressed by me.’

‘No? I never liked mine much either. Left France to get away. Tried to do a better job with Alissa, better than he did with me. It appears I might not have been as successful as I thought. The truth about being a parent is that it’s completely impossible. Did you know that? When they’re small they worship you. Later, secretly or openly, they judge you. The best you can hope for is that you live long enough for them to forgive you.’

‘May I ask, monsieur, if you forgave your father?’

‘To forgive someone, you need to stand in front of them. You need to look them in the eyes. You can’t do it by post. When my old man died, I had not seen him for thirteen years.’

‘He was Rimbaud’s friend.’

‘They weren’t friends, not really. Neither had any gift for friendship.’

‘Verlaine?’

‘Rimbaud shot Verlaine.’

‘Only a small wound.’

‘Is that your definition of friendship? Fine to shoot them so long as you don’t actually kill them? I shall have to warn the others.’ He rubs his hands across his face, rasps the stubble. Beneath his breath he starts to sing. ‘ “Quand Madelon vient nous servir à boire” . . I think,’ he says. ‘I shall go to bed with the rest of the Saint-Emilion. You don’t mind, I hope?’

‘No,’ says Yuji. ‘No, of course.’ Then, speaking carefully as though stood before the examiner, he expresses again his regret over the fate of France.

‘I don’t hold you personally responsible,’ says Feneon.

‘Thank you,’ says Yuji. He bows, steps back, turns, and retreats to the hall. Hanako has gone out, the door is shut. He pulls on his boots, takes his umbrella, opens the door. From the step, as he buttons his coat, he sees that someone is sheltering behind the pillar of the verandah across the street. The brim of a hat, the hem of a raincoat, the heel of a shoe. For a moment he can go neither forwards nor back. Then he puts up his umbrella and hurries to his bicycle, his boots splashing in the yellow mud of the road.

4

He is sitting on the drying platform, his back to that part of the wooden wall that divides the platform from Father’s room. The writing board is on his lap, and on the board a page of writing, the last of the Ishihara piece. He has found an entirely unexpected pleasure in the work, just as he found something disquietingly sympathetic about Ishihara himself. Even the novels, with their utter indifference to the genius of the language, their interminable dark combats between unblemished youth and corrupt old age, the page after page of impossible odds, flashing swords, terse farewells, the boy heroes with skin ‘pale as a maiden’s’ or ‘shining with the vitality of his seventeen years’, have had unexpected virtues, have even, on occasion, spoken to him, to some inner and unattended condition of his heart, his spirit.

Is he not, then, quite what he thought he was? Not the observer standing at a distance, arms folded, a supercilious smile on his face, but nearer to one of those Ishihara spoke of as the future, pouring from the factory gates as the steam whistle shrieks? Can he imagine himself among them, brow grimy with sweat, eyes narrowed against the evening sun, not an individual any more but part of the animated destiny of the nation? ‘A hundred million hearts beating as one!’ ‘Onward, Asian brothers, onward!’ ‘Work, work, for the sake of the country!’ To say such slogans sincerely, to shout them out when everyone was shouting them out so that you cannot tell your own voice from your neighbour’s, might that not be a little like falling in love?

He is crafting a sentence about Ishihara’s manner of speech, its passionate sincerity (he wants, but cannot quite bring himself to write ‘apparent’) when Miyo puts her head out of the door and tells him he has a visitor.

‘Someone to see me?’

She makes a face as if to say. ‘Isn’t that what a visitor is?’, then slips away. He brings the board inside, buttons his shirt. He has not heard anyone arrive, no car pull up, no call from the vestibule. Who visits him in the middle of a Tuesday morning? An angry woman? A father demanding explanations? Or someone from the military clerk’s office, a red envelope in his hand?

He goes downstairs. The doors of Mother’s room are open. There are voices inside, the sighing sing-song of middle-aged women. Cautiously, he peers inside. ‘Mother . .?’

The room is lighter than usual, morning sunlight filtering through the paper screens where the sharply etched shadows of leaves move almost imperceptibly.

‘Here he is,’ says Mother. ‘Please sit with us, Yuji. Mrs Miyazaki is paying us a visit.’

He looks at the other woman, recognises her, though only just, for in all the time he has known Taro, the seven years since they first sat beside each other in Professor Komada’s class, he has seen her no more than three or four times. A woman — today in a pigeon-coloured kimono — in awe of her children, her children’s confident friends. One of the old-style wives, content to kneel at the kitchen door waiting to be told when to bring the sake in. A life lived at the edge of the visible. Yet here she is, sitting on a cushion at the house of Professor Takano and his well-born wife, her hands in her lap, the little movements of her fingers suggesting an embarrassment that moment by moment threatens to crush her.

Yuji kneels beside Mother.

‘Mrs Miyazaki was just telling me about her son,’ she says. ‘It appears that he has volunteered for the army.’

‘Taro?’

‘Junzo,’ says Mrs Miyazaki. ‘Junzo has gone.’

He gapes at her. ‘Junzo?’

‘He left the house four days ago. I have not seen him since.’

‘Junzo? But he has exemption. He has his student deferment . .’

‘Mrs Miyazaki,’ says Mother, ‘was wondering if he had said anything to you.’

‘About this? No. Nothing.’

Discreetly, Mrs Miyazaki begins to weep. Haruyo brings in the tea.

‘He has not been himself for several weeks,’ says Mrs Miyazaki, dabbing her powdery cheeks with a tissue. ‘His elder brother thinks he might have made an attachment. One that has caused him some unhappiness. Please forgive my rudeness, but you are quite sure there is nothing you can tell me? You are his friend. He would not have done this without a reason, would he?’

For the first time, Yuji sees something of Junzo in her, something sharp and unexpectedly wilful in her gaze. He turns from her, exchanges a glance with Mother, then looks at Ryuichi, the candlelight playing palely over his face. He cannot take it in. Junzo in the army? Junzo at boot camp? Junzo at the Front with the likes of Captain Mori and Corporal Kitamura? And what is this nonsense she wants him to tell her about? A mystery girlfriend he has never met?

They sit there in silence, their faces composed as though waiting, with some impatience, for a messenger to arrive. After a minute Yuji makes a sound in his throat, a grunt of irritation. (What is this pigeon-coloured woman doing here, tearing his day in two?) He tells her that he is, regrettably, unable to answer her question. Is it possible there has been a misunderstanding? That Junzo only spoke of volunteering without ever intending his words to be taken seriously? He will, however, attempt to investigate. He will try to discover the information he should already possess but somehow does not. He apologises, climbs to his feet.

‘There,’ says Mother, her voice like the careful folding of silk. ‘I was sure Yuji would be able to help you.’

‘Indeed,’ says Mrs Miyazaki. ‘He has been most kind.’ And she begins again to weep, more loudly this time, crying up tears from her belly as though her second-born, her baby, her brilliant Junzo, was already lost to her. It is unlikely, thinks Yuji, as he slides the doors shut behind him, that such a disturbing sound will be permitted to remain much longer.

5

It takes three days to find Taro. When he has tried all the usual places he goes down to Tokyo Central, to a drinking house in the precincts of the station, a fifteen-seater that specialises in broiled eels and a clear soup of eel livers, and where he knows that some of the junior men from the government offices like to stop for an hour between work and the train ride to the suburbs. Taro is at a table in the corner with four others, all in shirtsleeves. The cook, fanning the charcoal, where a row of skewered eels is sizzling, sees Yuji and barks a welcome. Taro glances up. Yuji raises a hand. He hopes that Taro will leave the table and join him but Taro stays where he is. Yuji takes the seat opposite him. He is introduced. Everyone is perfectly civil but the mood is cool. They are from the ministry, servants of the minister, agents, in their humble way, of the Imperial will. He — whoever he is, whatever it is he does — is an outsider. Soon they politely ignore him. When one of them mentions a certain Mr Honda and the others immediately guffaw, no one troubles to explain why Mr Honda is so amusing. Yuji studies the tabletop. After twenty minutes two of the men, draping jackets over their arms, picking up their umbrellas and briefcases, leave for their train. A few minutes later the others go.

‘You want to stay here?’ asks Taro.

‘Are you expecting more of your colleagues?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘Mr Honda, perhaps?’

They move to a coffee shop in a side street near the station. There’s a mural of a Roman temple along one of its walls, and on top of a glass cabinet of kasutera sponge cakes, there’s a hand-tinted photograph of Mussolini greeting Hitler or Hitler greeting Mussolini.

They sit, order from a girl in a beret. Taro puts a pack of cigarettes and a lighter on the table in front of him. ‘I suppose Mother has been to your place,’ he says.

‘Yes.’

‘I hope she was not an inconvenience.’

‘She told me about Junzo.’

‘Of course.’

‘So it’s true?’

‘Of course.’

‘He volunteered?’

‘Yes.’

‘And his student deferment?’

‘He volunteered.’

‘He’s Class D!’

‘When someone volunteers,’ says Taro, flatly, as though reading from a sheet of paper, some government prescript, ‘it’s supposed to be an occasion for rejoicing.’

‘This is Junzo!’

‘Why not Junzo? He has put the nation’s needs before his own. In doing so, he has brought great honour on the family. Once Mother has stopped looking for foolish explanations she will prepare his thousand-stitch belt, and when the moment comes we will go to the station to bid him farewell.’ He stirs his coffee, lights a cigarette. He looks gaunt, exhausted. ‘The country is at war,’ he says.

‘You believe Junzo could ever make a soldier?’

‘In a soldier, spirit counts for more than stature.’

‘So you won’t try to stop him?’

‘How can I?’ He volunteered.’

‘Isn’t there someone you could speak to? Someone at the ministry?’

‘I work in the education department, not the War Ministry.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘He has a room.’

‘A room?’

‘In Kagurazaka.’

‘You’ve seen him?’

‘I have respected his wishes.’

‘And his wish is not to see you?’

‘He is preparing himself.’

‘Preparing?’

‘Hardening himself. Visits from an elder brother will not help him.’

‘You sound like a character in an Ishihara novel.’

‘Far from criticising us,’ says Taro, ‘you might want to study his example. You might even want to imitate it.’

‘Eh?’

‘Wouldn’t volunteering solve your allowance problem?’

‘They would never take me.’

‘They took Junzo.’

‘Even so . .’

‘They don’t throw any back these days.’

‘My chest . .’

‘Your chest would benefit greatly from the exercise. That doctor of yours, what’s his name?’

‘Kushida.’

‘He could write a new letter explaining that in his opinion you are now fit for active service.’

‘So what’s stopping you from going? You seem so eager for us all to be in uniform . .’

‘For now I have my work at the ministry. But as a reservist, I can, as you know, be called at any time. When the call comes, I will welcome it.’ He stubs out his cigarette on a picture of Mount Vesuvius in the ashtray. ‘It will be a great relief to me.’

They look past each other. On the gramophone there is a song in Italian, some swaying, lachrymose love song that the girl in the beret, drying cups, is silently mouthing the words to.

‘I saw Feneon,’ says Yuji.

‘I suppose they will try to move now.’

‘Where could they go?’

‘Anywhere.’

‘Anywhere? How unconcerned you sound.’

‘Was Alissa there?’

‘No.’

‘I am not unconcerned.’

‘Junzo was there before me.’

‘He told me.’

‘I wondered if Feneon might have said something to him.’

‘Suggest he join the army? It’s hardly likely, is it?’ He glances at his watch, counts coins onto the table, pockets his cigarettes and lighter. As they cross the road, a few drops of rain begin to fall, each fat drop hitting the pavement with a noise like something snapping.

‘Taking the train?’ asks Taro.

Yuji shakes his head. ‘I think I’ll go to Asakusa. See a film.’

‘Japanese or foreign?’

‘I’ll decide when I get there.’

‘I couldn’t have stopped him,’ says Taro. ‘You know how he is.’

‘Yes.’

‘Perhaps he’s seen things more clearly than us.’

‘And this “attachment”?’

‘All of that sort of thing . .’ Taro shrugs.

‘I know,’ says Yuji. ‘He’s volunteered.’

‘Yes.’

‘The country’s at war.’

‘Yes. He will be angry with me, but if you want to see him so much. .’ He takes out a pen and writes an address on the back of a business card. ‘Tell him that his family are thinking of him.’

‘I will.’

‘And don’t take too seriously what I said about you doing the same. I don’t want two of you to worry about.’

‘I would not wish to burden you,’ says Yuji. They grin at each other, shyly. ‘Will we meet again soon?’

‘Of course.’

‘Au revoir, then.’

‘Yes. Au revoir.’

They walk away from each other, but after twenty strides Yuji stops. Why not persuade Taro to come with him to the cinema? A good film, a bowl of noodles, some beer . . They can still do that much, can’t they? He turns and sees his friend crossing the concourse, his broad back, his big shoulders already starting to be rounded by desk work, but before he can follow or call out to him, the crowd opens one of its many doors, and Taro, without a pause, without a moment’s hesitation, steps inside and is lost to sight.

6

He cannot, as he has intended, go straight to Kagurazaka the next morning. Haruyo catches him as he crouches by the vestibule step tying the laces of his shoes, and tells him that Mother’s medication needs collecting from the clinic. He cycles there. Kushida is out on a call but a nurse who recognises Yuji, takes him up to the dispensary on the first floor. ‘Mrs Takano,’ she mutters, ‘Mrs Takano . .’ then lifts down a pair of grey canisters from the shelf and passes them to Yuji. She cocks her head. ‘Anything for yourself?’

She is one of those ominously flirtatious older women who have an appetite for men ten or fifteen years their junior. She reminds him of Mother’s friend, Mrs Sasaki, and of those farcical scenes at her house in Sendagi as she made him try on all the dead husband’s jackets, adjusting the collars for him, smoothing the shoulders, the heavy perfume from the sleeves of her kimono making it difficult to breathe.

‘This must be worth something,’ says Yuji, nodding to the well-stocked shelves, the bottles and boxes, many with their labels printed in German or English.

‘Shall we go into business together?’ asks the nurse, pulling the steel door shut behind them and double-locking it with a key from the bunch she carries in the pocket of her apron.

On the corridor, even in the middle of the morning, the overhead lights are burning as though shadow was a kind of pollution, something that might get into a wound. They pass Kushida’s office. The door is open. ‘Sensei?’ coos the nurse, tapping softly on the wood, but there is no reply. On the desk under the window, a large bell jar is striped with the sunlight that falls through the slats of the venetian blind. Inside the jar, hanging in a colourless fluid, is an object about the size of one of the carp in Kyoko’s pond. Yuji has a glimpse of an eye, immaculately shut, the splayed fingers of a miniature hand, a loosely flexed knee. ‘Everyone,’ says the nurse, ushering Yuji to the top of the stairs, ‘must have a pastime, no?’

He leaves the canisters outside Mother’s door, leaves his bicycle in the front garden, and walks to the tram-stop to catch a number 7 to Iidabashi. From there he crosses the main road, and keeping to the shadow side, the narrow strip of cool at the pavement’s inner edge, enters Kagurazaka, a High City district, one of the old pleasure quarters, but now long since left behind by the steady westward flow of money and fashion.

Distracted by the shimmering blue line between sun and shade, he walks straight past the turning Taro spoke of and has to double-back until he finds it, an alley lined with boarding houses, Meiji or early Taisho firetraps, the way between them so narrow the little front gardens, growing wild in so much rain, have reached across to each other, tendril twisting round the tip of tendril.

Ahead of him, two arrow-headed dogs are sleeping in the dust but there is, at first, no sign of the residents, the inhabitants of these shuttered, blank, blind old buildings. Only when he enters the alley does he begin to see them, soft human forms squatting or lying wherever the shade is deepest. Do they watch him as he passes? He cannot tell, but halfway down the alley he becomes aware of light feet following him and he turns to find a girl of eight or ten, a sleeping infant on her back, some little brother or sister tied to her with a length of patterned cloth, the weight of it making her stoop like an old woman carrying firewood. She asks if he is lost. He tells her he is looking for his friend. ‘That’s good,’ she says, she knows everyone in the alley, she even knows the names of all the cats and dogs. He gives her Junzo’s name. ‘He’s not here,’ she says, because she has never heard of him, but when Yuji describes him she nods. ‘He doesn’t have a name yet,’ she says, ‘He hasn’t been here long enough.’ She takes his hand and guides him to a house a degree more decrepit, more hopeless than the others. It is the house of an uncle of hers, she says, a sort of uncle. Inside, Yuji cannot see at all. He shuffles behind her, following the pull of her bony hand, the curdled-milk smell of the infant. They climb a tightly turning staircase. Now and then some partly open shutter or torn screen suddenly reveals the elaborate makeshift of the house’s inner structure, and as they ascend, their heads press against a damp and thickening heat as if they are climbing into the base of a storm cloud.

At the top of the house, the girl sings out a greeting and slides open the tattered door. It is the attic room (what does one pay for such a room?), a space that can never have been intended for human habitation, its ceiling nothing but the steeply raked beams and tiles of the roof. Light comes from a hole you would have to lie on your belly to look through. There is a smell of birds, bird droppings, sour human sweat.

‘He must have gone out,’ says the girl. And then, as though the house, the whole alley, was truly another country, she adds, ‘You have made a journey for nothing.’

On the wooden boards is an old but neatly rolled mattress, and next to it a shoulder bag and four or five books — The Science of Logic Vol. IV, a book of campcraft for boys, a Sino-Japanese dictionary. There is also a small picture frame, face down. On the girl’s back, the infant whimpers in its sleep. The girl whispers to it, a language all their own, then asks Yuji if he wants some tea. Cold barley? Salty cherry blossom? If he wants some, she will run and fetch it. He shakes his head. He cannot possibly wait here. Alone in this room it would steal into him; he would breathe it in like bad luck. He brushes a mosquito from his cheek. He would like to leave something, some evidence of his having been there, and he rummages in his pockets but can find nothing more personal, more suitable, than the propelling pencil he carries for making notes (those insights and observations that have no purpose to them any more). He stretches into the room, places the pencil on top of the books, then follows the girl down, each of them brushing the stairwell wall with their fingers. In the alley, he gives her a coin. She puts it in a fold of the sash round her waist. ‘He has to be fed now,’ she says. ‘Don’t you think he’s like a big insect?’

Next morning, reluctant to be there again, in that heat, that stink, he finds excuses to put off his return. He has the Ishihara piece to revise, and now that he knows where Junzo is staying, has been to the alley, the room, what urgency is there? If Junzo wants a taste of squalor, if he is ‘hardening’ himself, then that is up to Junzo. It is not his responsibility to drag him home. Taro will take care of it, or Mr Miyazaki, or even Mrs Miyazaki, who, in her own way, is evidently not without resources. He stays busy, lets the day pass, but on the second day, stricken with shame, he makes up a parcel — a tin of Mosquiton, a wooden-handled French-made clasp-knife, his much-prized, much-scribbled-into copy of Rimbaud’s early poems (including ‘The Open Road’ — ‘A week of walking has torn my boots to shreds’), and on the third morning he sets out again for the alley. He looks for the girl, then, not finding her, finds the house and goes up on his own. The attic door is open, the rolled mattress is there, but the books, the bag, the picture frame have gone. He comes back down. As he opens the screen to the verandah a man in a crumpled yukata, a lacework of pale scars around his eyes, shuffles from the shadows and bids Yuji good morning.

‘Good morning,’ says Yuji.

‘You were looking for someone?’ asks the man, not recognising Yuji’s voice.

‘The one who was in the attic,’ says Yuji.

The man grunts, straightens his back, puts his stick across his shoulder. He swings an arm, marches on the spot in sandals soled with pieces of motorcycle tyre. ‘I was an army man myself,’ he calls, as Yuji, the parcel under his arm, walks away between the light and darker blues of morning glory. ‘How do you think I lost these, eh?’ — a finger jabbing towards his eyes, the broken stare — ‘Sitting at home minding my own business?’

7

On the dance floor of the Don Juan — a floor at this mid-afternoon hour otherwise deserted — Dick Amazawa’s mistress, Fumi Kihara, is dancing alone to the music of a gramophone. At the edge of the floor, in the same yellow-striped jacket he was wearing in the Azabu Hills, Amazawa is conducting the music with a matchstick the length and thickness of his arm. The match is a prop from a short film he has just completed, a Home Ministry commission in which — so he has just explained to Yuji — Fumi plays a bored young woman about to light a cigarette when a silver-haired gentleman in civil defence uniform leans through the window to ask, ‘Do you need that more than he does?’ At this, the camera spins to a trench — in fact, the corner lot of a studio in the suburbs — where a handsome sapper under heavy fire is searching frantically for a match to light the fuse of his bomb.

‘It’s simple,’ says Amazawa, now holding the match like a kendo sword and softly tapping the top of Yuji’s head, ‘but simple takes some thinking about.’

Stretched the length of the bench opposite, Hideo Makiyama is reading Yuji’s article. Now and then he clucks, pulls out a pen from the breast pocket of his shirt, and puts a line through a word or sometimes, imperiously — the movement setting Yuji’s teeth on edge — through an entire sentence. The white light of the Ginza stabs the bar’s permanent midnight each time a customer pushes through the swing doors. Waitresses from the early shift are coming down the stairs, while those for the late shift go up with their bags and parasols to the dressing room on the first floor. Yuji watches for the girl who poured for him at the House of Falling Leaves but does not see her. Nor does he see her friend, the girl with the ribbons he left waiting for him in the corridor.

‘Too academic,’ drawls Makiyama, sitting up and shuffling the sheets of paper together. ‘Too much showing off. But other than that, not bad . . not bad at all.’

‘You think it will be suitable?’

‘With some tidying up.’

‘You’ll be able to place it, then? In Young Japan?’

‘I said so, didn’t I? They’re running a special on the key men of the new era, generals, politicians, sportsmen, writers. Ishihara will have three or four pages to himself. Lots of pictures, too, of course. Author at home, author at the Front, author contemplating the evening sky.’

‘So it will come out?’

‘In two weeks.’

‘So soon?’

‘They’ve been waiting for you.’

‘If I had realised.’

‘I told them not to be concerned.’

‘I’m grateful for your confidence.’

‘I look inside people,’ says Makiyama, yawning and stretching himself on the bench again. ‘I looked inside you.’

‘Don’t forget to pay him,’ says Amazawa. ‘And if you like it so much, shouldn’t he have something extra?’

Still prone, Makiyama peels three ten-yen notes from a roll carried casually in a trouser pocket, then, after a second’s teasing, peels off a fourth. ‘Didn’t you,’ he says to Amazawa, ‘have something you wanted to say to him? Some proposition?’

‘A proposition? Yes.’ He looks at Yuji with small bloodshot eyes, then hurriedly eats something out of the palm of his hand, swallowing it with a mouthful of beer. ‘Ever tried writing a screenplay?’

Yuji shakes his head.

‘There’s not much to it.’

‘No?’

‘It’s not really like writing a story. More like the blueprint for a machine.’

‘I see.’

‘You could try writing something for the Unit. You know the sort of thing.’

‘Hmm. I wonder . .’

‘It was his idea.’

‘Mr Makiyama’s?’

‘Ishihara, of course. He said he had spoken freely to you. That you understood.’

‘A vision of the future, perhaps?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Or like the film at General Sugiyama’s?’

‘Don’t speak of that in here.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No one is ready for that yet.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’ve read the Italian futurists? Marinetti, Balla?’

‘I’ve heard of them . .’

‘Something exalted, something delirious . .’

‘I could try, I suppose.’

‘By the way,’ says Makiyama, ‘you may find you have to break your connection with certain people.’

‘You think so?’

‘The front line,’ says Amazawa, pressing the head of the match against Yuji’s chest, ‘runs through every heart.’

‘I hadn’t thought of it like that.’

‘You can have that if you want,’ says Amazawa. ‘The front-line line. I’m giving it to you.’

‘Thank you.’

Amazawa and Makiyama look at each other. They start to giggle, though to Yuji, Amazawa seems close to tears as if his emotions had a life of their own and cycled mechanically through their repertoire with little regard for what he was doing or thinking.

‘You want to dance with her?’

‘With . .?’

‘With her.’ He points the match at Fumi.

‘You think she wants to dance?’

‘She’s on the dance floor, isn’t she?’

‘It’s true.’

‘Don’t you like her?’

‘She seems nice.’

‘How old do you think she is?’

‘I don’t know. Twenty-four, twenty-five?’

‘You’re not even close,’ he says. ‘If you want to be a real artist, you’ll have to learn how to tell such things at a glance.’

So Yuji dances with her. She lolls her head on his shoulder. She smells of sherbet and honey and cigarettes. They are moving, but much more slowly than the music. Talking into his chest, she says she used to be a taxi-dancer at a place called the Polar Bear Club in Shinjuku but that one night a girl jumped from the roof and after that business wasn’t so good. People complained the place was haunted.

‘You think it was?’

She shrugs, her shoulders like the delicate, useless stubs of wings. ‘Are you going to work at the Unit?’ she asks.

‘I’m not sure what the Unit is.’

‘It’s whatever he wakes up thinking it is.’

‘Ishihara?’

‘The general.’

‘The general?’

‘I’m awfully tired,’ she says. ‘You won’t let me fall, will you?’

He tells her he won’t. He tightens his arm around the top of her waist. They sway, their feet scuffing the boards. He is, to his surprise, quite comfortable with her, and as they turn in slow motion across the rhythmic gloom of the dance floor, his mind goes out in a long exhalation . . He finds himself thinking of a forest in France — Champagne? Compígne? — where the French have signed the instrument of surrender (he has not dared to visit Feneon again); of the barracks near Yokohama where Junzo, who in a letter to Taro has confirmed his unshakable resolve, is starting basic training; of that trouble at the cinema yesterday afternoon (he had gone to watch Mizoguchi’s The Gorge Between Love and Hate) when a man, slow to stand at the sight of the Emperor’s black Mercedes on the Nihon News newsreel, was shouted at, threatened by a figure at the back of the auditorium, one of those new-style patriots who, it was said, carry billy clubs beneath their jackets; and of the morning paper, the Yomiuri, that had on its front page a photograph of schoolchildren carrying their classroom stove slung from a pole like a pig on its way to slaughter. They were delivering it to the War Ministry to be melted down and made into part of an aircraft or the barrel of a howitzer or whatever it is the nation needs more of to ensure its victory. How bright their faces were! And how merrily they seemed to march behind their teacher! It was affecting, a genuinely inspiring example, yet with something so pitiful in it Yuji, reading on the downtown tram, found himself wishing it was he who marched ahead of them, leading them — by some suitably circuitous route — back to their classroom where the stove could be fitted again and next winter they would have something more than the spirit of sacrifice to keep them warm.

In his arms, Fumi has fallen asleep or passed out. He is holding her entire weight, though fortunately she is thin, emaciated even, and only her head, pressed against his chest, seems to have any weight to it. Should he manoeuvre her, unobtrusively as possible, back to the booths, or keep swaying with her until she comes to? He looks across the top of her head, her not very clean hair, hoping to find Dick Amazawa and somehow signal to him, but the film-maker is over by the bar using his outsized match to putt an orange into the cupped hands of a kneeling waitress. He lines up the shot with the greatest care. A small crowd gathers. At the third attempt the orange rolls neatly into the waitress’s hands. Everyone applauds, enthusiastically.

8

The rains are over. It’s high summer now. The sewing room, uncomfortable by night, is, by the middle of the day, impossible. The coolest place is the garden privy. There, the shade of old wood, the breezes that lap through the open lattice at the base of the door, the scent of cedar boughs and black earth, give the feeling of sitting in the depths of a forest, and though the light is pale grey or brown or a soft green, it is, when the brilliance of the outer light is shaken off, just bright enough to read by, or even to write sketches for a screenplay, blueprints for a machine whose purpose he does not yet understand, visions of the future where the dead are admired as a kind of poetry.

He is in there one morning considering a fresh attempt (something of Hitchcock, something of Marinetti) when he decides instead to use the paper on his lap to write to Junzo. It is a short letter, boyish and full of trivia — ‘Yesterday I was at Grandfather’s and helped lay out the plums to dry for pickling . . Mother and the serving girl are down with “B shortage” . . My uncle, the one from the farm, will be coming for the Festival of the Dead. Will you have any leave? Will you be in Tokyo?’

Invisibly, at the side of this letter, another, much longer letter is being written, one that contains all that cannot now be raised between them. The unexplained remarks in the yard of the billiard parlour, the sudden decision to volunteer, the visit from Mrs Miyazaki, the room in Kagurazaka and the Feneons, of course, père et fille, about whom he has, anyway, no news.

In a drawer of the dresser in the Western room he finds an envelope, addresses it care of the Miyazaki house. Miyo is on a mattress on the floor of the Japanese room. When he asks her how she is feeling, she whispers that she is still too weak to move. ‘B shortage’ is a kind of annual holiday for her, an enervation vastly preferable to doing chores in the full heat of late July. It is Father who allows her this time (the half-deception of it), who sends Kushida to her with vitamin injections and sees that she has the same medicinal foods — the clam broths and twice-cooked brown-rice porridges — Mother has. Without his orders, Haruyu would drag the girl into the kitchen by her hair.

With the letter in his pocket, he cycles to the post office in Ueno, then on to the park, to Shinobazu Pond, where he looks, with strange pangs of regret, at the lilies. From a barrow he buys a slice of watermelon, finds an empty bench and begins to eat, spitting the glossy seeds into his fist. On the grass nearby, four teenage recruits are smoking, sharing two cigarettes between them. As they lift the cigarettes to their mouths, Yuji sees how the flesh of their hands is bruised, cut about, the knuckles swollen and raw. They show little interest in the world about them. Only when a girl goes by, some schoolgirl in a pleated skirt (the sort of girl who will one day soon dutifully wave them off from a station platform) do they glance up, as if out of habit, to watch her passing.

He looks at his own hands, feels for them a sudden anxious affection, then cleans his fingers on the grass, wheels his bicycle out of the park, and rides for home. On either side of the road, the screens of houses stand wide, dark mouths waiting for a breeze to swallow. On verandahs, on shadowed stoops, fans flicker like bird tails. The heat streams over his face, his throat. In this breath a taste of jasmine, in this, of drains. He crosses the dual shimmer of the tram lines, free-wheels into the end of his street, then pulls on the brakes with such sharp force the bicycle bucks and almost tips him off. Drawn up outside Itaki’s tobacco store is the car he climbed out of (with such relief) by the Yasukuni shrine in May. There is no mistaking it, the glitter, the fulsome curves. Itaki’s grandchildren are walking slowly round it, following their splayed reflections in the metal. The car door opens. The children jump back. Ota, in white high-waisted trousers, a dazzling white shirt, steps from the car’s interior and watches, with mocking gaze, Yuji pushing the old bicycle towards him.

‘You came to see me?’ asks Yuji, flushed from his ride. He takes in the cufflinks, the ring, the gold-rimmed sunglasses hooked over the monogrammed breast pocket of the shirt. Everything this man is wearing has the character of an admirer’s gift. ‘Perhaps you would care to come into the house?’

Ota opens one of the car’s heavy rear doors and from the stitched leather of the back seat he takes a magazine, also a small square package wrapped in black crêpe. He passes the magazine to Yuji. It is the new edition of Young Japan, on the cover a picture of Kaoru Ishihara, his groomed head in three-quarters profile as he stares, solemnly, into the undisclosed distance.

‘It will not be on sale to the public until next week,’ says Ota. ‘But he thought you might care to see a copy in advance. He also wishes you to have this. A small expression of his gratitude for your efforts.’ He holds out the package. It is clear to Yuji that Ota knows exactly what it contains and that it is, in his opinion, a wasted gift, one that Yuji will not know how to value.

‘There is really no need,’ says Yuji.

‘He prizes loyalty,’ says Ota.

‘Loyalty?’

‘Surely you understood that much?’

‘Yes. Of course . .’

‘My arm,’ says Ota, ‘is growing tired.’

Yuji leans the bicycle against his thigh. He takes the package from Ota’s outstretched hand and is reciting the formal expressions of gratitude when, from the opposite side of the street, a woman’s voice rips the air with a yell of fury. Startled, they turn to find Grandma Kitamura hastening through the gate of her house while the postman, in his straw hat, retreats ahead of her, bowing compulsively and screwing up his face like a dog desperate to avoid a thrashing. Kyoko, her feet bare, her hair undressed, is tugging at the old woman’s obi to slow her down and has almost brought her to a halt when they both catch sight of Yuji. They stop. Across the old woman’s face spreads a light of savage triumph. She swings towards him, aims at him the crumpled telegram in her fist, points it at his head like a pistol. ‘They’re sending him home a cripple!’ she roars. ‘That will make you happy, won’t it? But even a cripple is more use than you! Do the Takanos think they can leave others to do their suffering for them? You wait until he’s back! You wait and see what he’ll do with types like you!’

Behind Yuji, the Armstrong Siddeley’s engine ignites, revs throatily. There’s a blast from the horn, then the car accelerates away, Ota at the wheel, his face creased with silent laughter. Those who are left — the protagonists, the gang of neighbours, the casual audience of passers-by — stand in a little haze of gasoline and summer dust. Someone coughs. The postman makes his escape. The old woman, shoulders heaving, tears dripping stickily from the hairs of her chin, is guided by Kyoko back towards her house. At his own gate, Yuji is dimly aware of Haruyo, and behind her, peeping from the heavy shade of the vestibule, Miyo, risen from her bedding. A sudden hush descends. It seems that everyone is waiting for him to do something. He stares at the road, the drops of fresh oil like spoor, the tyre prints, then looks at the package in his hand. Is this the ending they require? To see what the dazzling stranger has brought him? He rolls the magazine, tucks it under his arm, and tears the black crêpe. Inside is a velvet-skinned box, and inside the box, lying in a crease of cream satin, a pin with a ruby head. He studies it awhile, then, with a fingernail, extracts the ribbon of folded paper from the lid of the box, unfurls it, and reads what, in passable calligraphy, is written there. ‘What do the victims matter if the gesture be beautiful?’

‘Yuji!’

Father is calling him in. Father is scowling magnificently. Yuji, clutching his gifts, crosses the street towards him.

9

In the little cemetery at Kotobuki the men are cleaning Grandmother Takano’s grave. When they finish, they cross a path to Ryuichi’s grave and start again, wiping and scraping away another year of lichen, of the city’s soft fall of soot from the stacks across the river. Kensuke’s daughter, Asako, sits with her child, three-year-old Akiko, in the shade of a gingko tree, and answers, as simply as she can, the little girl’s questions about the world of the dead, the duties of the living. All across the cemetery, across the whole city, the smoke of incense uncoils in the shimmering heat of midday. The men step back, mop their faces. Their brows are shining. They stand in silence until the child, running from the shade, clutches Kensuke’s hand and tugs it as though suddenly afraid for him. He lifts her up, sits her in his arms. Grandfather takes out his pocket watch. The lid flashes in the sunlight as he opens it. ‘The taxis will be waiting,’ he says. ‘I don’t like to make them wait in this heat.’

They go to a restaurant in the Hamacho quarter, owned by a Mr Kono, the adopted son of one of Grandfather’s old employees. Kono has kept the best table for them, in a private room that overlooks a small garden where the blooms of the pomegranates are so vivid they almost burn the eye. The meal begins with chilled bean curd. Later there are salads, persimmon leaf sushi, eel hamo-style. Yuji is kneeling beside Asako. When, yesterday, she arrived at the house with her father and daughter (Sawa, at the last minute, had decided her back was too painful for such a journey), she was wearing a skirt and blouse, but today, for the Festival of Lanterns, the Festival of the Dead, she is dressed more formally in a cream kimono with a pattern of tangling ivy. To Yuji, who has not seen her since her wedding in Showa 10, she appears to have lost all trace of the old mountain-child boisterousness that once so impressed him. Each speaks evasively about the present, the recent past, and starts to smile only when they reminisce about the long-ago summer at the farm — the waterfall, the berry-picking, the ill-tempered cockerel that pecked at Yuji’s heels until she chased it off with clods of earth. As they talk, the little girl, shy, almost voiceless in this unfamiliar company, prods suspiciously at her food and every few seconds glances up intently at the side of her mother’s face.

Across the table, Uncle Kensuke is showing Grandfather a photograph. Yuji has already seen it — Hiroshi stiff and gaunt in the uniform of a newly graduated pilot of the First Air Fleet.

‘He should be with us today,’ says Grandfather. ‘He should be here.’

‘He would have liked to,’ says Uncle Kensuke, ‘but it seems that their training is intensifying.’

‘The same goes for your husband,’ says Grandfather, looking over the table at Asako. ‘You would think Mitsubishi could spare him for a day or two.’

‘Minoru,’ says Uncle Kensuke, ‘is helping to build the planes Hiroshi will be flying. Skilled technicians are in short supply.’

‘Like everything else,’ says Grandfather. ‘Well, at least they let my great-granddaughter come, eh? I must be grateful for that, I suppose.’

As the meal ends, Kono persuades them to take some little glasses of cognac. He joins them, and sits with Grandfather while the old man tells him tales about the city in the days of the first China war of ’94, stories that falter into song, into sighing nasal elegies for the tea houses of the Yanagibashi, the night cherries of the Yoshiwara . . Father and Uncle Kensuke move to the open screens, light cigarettes and peer out at the lengthening shadows of the garden. Yuji, his back to them as he shows the child for the fifth time, the sixth, the seventh, the only magic trick he knows (a ten-sen coin that ‘sinks’ through the skin of his hand to reappear behind one or other of her ears), listens to Uncle Kensuke talking, quietly and earnestly, about Father and Mother coming to the mountains.

‘We’ve more than enough room since the children left. We grow much of what we eat, kill the occasional hen. And Noriko can be as quiet there as she is here. With all that has happenened it can hardly be comfortable for you staying in Tokyo. As for the future . .’

‘Things are not as bad as all that.’

‘Really? That’s not been my impression.’

‘And what about Father?’

‘I’d ask him too if I thought there was the slightest hope of his coming. At least out in Setagaya he’s practically in the countryside. Things should be safer there.’

‘Safer?’

‘If there’s bombing.’

‘Bombing!

‘Look in the papers. The Germans are raiding English cities every day.’

‘The comparison is a little misleading, isn’t it? Where would these bombers come from? Chungking? Moscow?’

‘You should talk to Hiroshi. He has told me things I do not dare to tell Sawa. She has trouble enough sleeping as it is.’

‘I can’t see Noriko making such an upheaval. You saw her this morning.’

‘Better to make such a move now while there is still some normality.’

‘I appreciate your generosity.’

‘So you’ll consider it?’

‘There’s the question of Yuji.’

‘He, of course, is welcome too, but his situation . . I doubt even your friend Kushida can keep him out of the army for good . .’

Two butterflies, black as charred paper, blow into the room, flutter clumsily over the end of the table, then find their way back into the garden again.

‘On a day like today,’ says Father, ‘the situation doesn’t seem so serious. I don’t want to act rashly.’

‘I understand that,’ says Uncle Kensuke, ‘but if you don’t act at all . .’

For the three days before the visitors make their return journey, the child, with her small, determined face, follows Yuji around the house as though connected to him by a length of wire. When he slips away from her, she calls for him, hunts him down. He tells her, in an exasperated voice, that he is trying to write a film about the end of the world. She frowns, then squats on the mat in front of him and begins to wail. He gives in, takes the records out of the storage cupboard, lifts the gramophone from its long sleep beside the corner bookshelf in the Western room, and plays ragtime and jazz until the needles are blunt. He folds her birds out of paper, catches cicadas for her and shows her how, from her cupped hands, to free their clumsy bodies into the air again.

‘She’ll miss you,’ says Uncle Kensuke, sitting down on the verandah beside Yuji, the last morning of the visit. In the garden, the girl, a straw hat tied under her chin, is chasing dragonflies, now and then pausing to be sure that Yuji is watching her.

‘It must be the trick I showed her in the restaurant,’ says Yuji.

‘Who knows. Children choose the people they want.’

‘I thought I might remind her of Minoru.’

‘It’s possible. Though you could hardly be more unlike him.’

‘Is the taxi on its way?’

‘Another half-hour.’

‘I hope Auntie Sawa will be feeling better,’ says Yuji.

‘Yes. Let’s hope so.’

‘And please give my regards to Hiroshi.’

‘When we see him. They don’t give him much leave, and these days he often prefers something more exciting than a farm in the mountains and the company of two old people. You might see him in Tokyo one day.’

‘Yes. If I’m here.’

‘You want to go somewhere?’

‘I’m not sure what I want. But probably it won’t have anything to do with what I want.’

‘You mean, if you get your papers?’

‘Isn’t it inevitable?’

‘Tell me, are you writing these days?’

‘Some journalism.’ He shrugs. ‘I wouldn’t necessarily call it writing.’

‘Your father said it was something on Ishihara. He said it was well written.’

‘I didn’t know he had seen it.’

Uncle Kensuke smiles. ‘Apparently you left the magazine open on the table one morning.’

‘And he said it was well written?’

‘He doesn’t much care for Ishihara, of course, or Young Japan, but he has always respected your ability.’

‘My ability!’

‘When Ryuichi died your father became rather cynical. Stubborn and cynical. He wasn’t always so. When he was young he was full of enthusiasms. Quite a talker, even. You should not mistake his reticence for indifference.’

‘Did he say anything else? About me?’

‘Only that he was afraid he would not be able to protect you.’

‘From whom?’

‘He was not specific.’

‘I thought it was Father who needed protecting.’

‘All of us will need some protecting before the world is much older. But what about poetry?’

‘It doesn’t seem like a time for poetry.’

‘No? I can’t think of a better one. Isn’t poetry just about paying attention to what is here? Two men, for example, sitting talking while a child runs in the garden. The quietness of that has a certain value, don’t you think, in such a clamorous age?’

‘I’m not sure many share your view, Uncle. People want other things now.’

‘You might think it’s not a time for something as trivial as dyeing cloth, but now I’m doing it more carefully than ever because indigo is my way of speaking. Which reminds me. I have something for you. It’s in the suitcase. I’d almost forgotten . .’

They go through the house to where two tan leather cases are waiting by the edge of the vestibule step. Kneeling, Uncle unbuckles the smaller case, pulls out a pair of folded yukatas, some Tokyo newspapers, then lifts out a square of folded silk and holds it up to Yuji.

‘I remember the summer you stayed with us as a little boy you used to sit in the dyeing barn, sometimes for an hour or more, watching what I was doing. Hiroshi never had that sort of interest.’

Yuji takes the cloth, lets it fall open. It’s a square of subtly dyed silk, the indigo darkening in diagonal waves from blue-black to a blue so pale it’s like the blue of a vein on the inside of a child’s wrist.

‘It’s just a test piece, too small to be of much use, but somehow I liked the way it came out. I thought you might like it too.’

Yuji thanks him, holds the cloth up to the light that comes through the open doors of the Western room. ‘Do you also remember,’ he says, ‘how, that summer, you would often massage my chest in the evening before supper, and because the dye was on your hands it stained my skin? Even a month after I came home I could see it, though every day a little fainter.’

‘Indigo has special properties. Wrap something in indigo and you preserve it.’

‘Then,’ says Yuji, carefully folding the material, ‘I must find something precious to wrap in this.’

‘I’m sure you will,’ says Uncle Kensuke, absently, as he buckles the straps of the case.

In the garden the girl is calling Yuji’s name. A repetitive little voice, shrill as an insect. ‘Yuji! Yuji! Yujiii!’

10

The days that follow the visitors’ departure bring the first rumours of Saburo’s return. In the noodle bar, Sachiko, Otaki’s wall-eyed sister, serving him a lunch of zaru soba, tells him she has heard from a regular customer, who has a nephew who drinks with an assistant at the military clerk’s office in Ueno, that Saburo will be back before the beginning of the ninth month. The next afternoon, Mrs Itaki, wiping down the woodwork at the front of her shop, assures Yuji that her husband has been told by a soldier who saw Saburo in Dairen only two months ago that his ship, in all probability, will dock at Yokohama on 7 September. Even Miyo claims to know something, telling Yuji that their neighbour will return no earlier than the thirteenth but no later than the twentieth. Her informant is the soy-seller’s son, who heard it from his father, who heard it from the wife of an official he delivers to up in Yanaka.

The first of September — the beginning of the typhoon season, the seventeenth anniversary of the Great Earthquake — is a mournful day of sultry heat that feels neither like summer nor autumn. Yuji waits in his room and once an hour imagines he hears, rising above the cries of itinerant salesmen and the cooing of radio orchestras, the voice of his old friend, his enemy, calling to him.

On the seventh he waits again. Again on the eighth, on the ninth . . There are no more rumours. People seem to have forgotten about Saburo. Is he coming back at all? Yuji has not seen Grandma Kitamura since the telegram (is she ill?). Kyoko, he has glimpsed several times in the garden, early mornings and dusks on those days she was not on the trains. On the last occasion he imagined he noticed a subtle alteration in her, a suggestive melancholy in the way she picked a leaf from the surface of the pond, then stood still as a horse in the shade of the plum tree . . If a wound can get better, it can get worse too. Could the Kitamuras be waiting for a second telegram with darker, more conclusive news? Whatever the truth of it, he will listen to no more gossip from waitresses and serving girls.

On the thirteenth he cycles through a rising wind to meet Oki and Shozo at the bathhouse. As they wash at the taps, Oki says that he saw Junzo, two days after the Festival of the Dead, in a café in Jinbocho.

‘Who was he with?’

‘He was on his own.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Not much.’

‘Not much?’

‘It hardly seemed like him at all. After a few minutes I felt embarrassed and made up some appointment. In fact, I said I was meeting you.’

‘Did he ask about me?’

‘Just said I’d better go if I was meeting you.’

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it.’

Upstairs, after the bath, they drink beer and watch through the room’s only window the sky building with storm clouds. On the roof of the house opposite, a woman plucks streaming washing from a line, balls it in her arms, and hurries inside. ‘We’re in for a blow, all right,’ says Watanabe, swaying by the young men’s table on big splayed feet. ‘There’ll be roofs stripped by morning.’ His wife shouts up the stairs, tells him to close the rain shutters. The light goes on, feebly, under a shade of insect-speckled glass.

‘By the way,’ asks Shozo, as the young men gather by the street entrance, buttoning coats and tying mufflers, ‘is the French Club still going, or is that all over now?’

‘Over?’

‘I was just wondering. You know. . With things as they are.’

Outside, they separate with hasty waves. Yuji, his trouser cuffs snapping at his ankles, wheels his bicycle into the teeth of the wind. The sky is turquoise, orange, bruise yellow. A warm rain begins, a swirling downpour that seems to fall from all sides at once. In less than a minute Yuji is as wet as when he sat in the baths. A man beckons to him from a doorway. Yuji shakes his head. There is not far to go, and this sudden violence — all of summer being torn to pieces — is exhilarating. He shouts out scraps of poetry: ‘Cette idole, yeux noirs et crin jaune, sans parents ni cour!’ The wind smears the words across his face, the rain dashes them away. A pot of flowers (the kind of big ceramic tub he would struggle to lift on his own) sails from a roof garden and explodes in a halo of earth and petals against the manically creaking sign of a leather-goods store. When he reaches home he’ll carry the sake bottle up to the platform and stand there, captain of a doomed ship, reciting the whole of ‘Le Bateau Ivre’ to the thrashing gingko tree. What does it matter if it’s bad for his health? With things as they are, isn’t good health more of a threat to him than sickness? Good health could be the death of him.

By the time he arrives at the end of his own street the air stinks of sea wrack and flooded drains. He pauses beside the telegraph pole outside Otaki’s to wipe the water from his face. Then shielding his eyes with his hands, he watches an umbrella of lacquered paper (some kind of dark flower painted on its top) weaving up the middle of the road towards him. It’s hard at first to tell what’s going on. There seem to be three, perhaps four people beneath it, and with the wind behind them they are having to fight hard to keep the umbrella from being snatched away and flung over the singing radio aerials. What a subject for a Hiroshige print! The driving rain, the gloom, the jumbled legs, the shimmering umbrella held so low it hides their faces completely. It looks like a crab, or some strange blind cuttlefish labouring across the bottom of the ocean. He would laugh if he didn’t think the wind would scoop the air from his lungs. Could this be in the screenplay? An opening shot, comic-pathetic, an image redolent of struggle, absurdity . .

As they come closer — now accelerating a little, now trying to anchor themselves against the force of the storm — he begins to make it out. A woman on one side, a woman the other and between them, rocking between them, a figure, a dark figure, a man, a three-legged man, a man with a crutch . .

A crutch!

Dragging the bicycle with him, he presses himself against the pole. The umbrella comes to a halt fifteen yards away. A head appears — the old woman. She shoulders open her gate, then turns, and like some aged flunky from the court of Pu Yi, starts to shuffle backwards up the path, the umbrella gripped in both fists over the stooping man’s head. Kyoko is left behind to shut the gate. She glances into the street, looks both ways, her hair whipping about her face, but if she sees Yuji, if she picks out his ragged shadow from all this shifting, melting world, she gives no sign of it, and in another moment, hauling the gate against the wind, she is gone.

It blows all night, and in his dreams the sound of the wind becomes the noise of the firestorms twisting over the surface of the Sumida. It is blowing still when, at first light, he wakes (who was that woman with her hair on fire, her hair burning up like grass?), but the wind’s hard edge has gone and the rain has become a fine mist, a haze of saturated air. Cautiously, stealthily, he kneels on the wood of the platform and peers into the neighbours’ garden. The surface of the pond is thick with leaves but there is no one out there, and the house, what he can see of it through the dripping trees, looks as hushed and empty as a house abandoned.

He dresses, goes downstairs, drinks tea with Miyo (though tells her nothing), then puts on a beetle-coloured coat of oiled silk, puts on his old student cap, and taking the long way round, not passing the old woman’s house, sets off for Setagaya. Beads of rain drizzle from the peak of his cap. Before he has finished the walk from the station, past the building plots and the tea fields to the gates of Grandfather’s garden, the damp has permeated the silk of the coat and covered his skin with a blood-warm slick of atomised Pacific. The concertina roof of the old rickshaw is a vivid green slime. Between the wheels, a cockerel, its feathers dark with water, shifts its weight from foot to foot, and with a single hostile eye, watches Yuji on the path.

Grandfather greets him with a shout of laughter. ‘Look what the wind blew in!’

Fortunately, the bath is still hot from Grandfather’s morning ablutions. Yuji wallows in it, safe here, and almost sung to sleep by the mosquitoes in the coiling steam above him. Afterwards, he dresses in one of Grandfather’s yukatas and drinks tea with him, Sonoko sitting behind them with her sewing.

‘The neighbour’s back,’ says Yuji. ‘The old woman’s grandson.’

Grandfather nods. ‘I always thought he was half-witted.’

‘Perhaps.’

Later, there is the usual tour of the model (‘That temple bell comes from a child’s rattle. The real one, iron, and high as a man, melted like wax.’), then a lunch of bean curd and baked seaweed.

In the afternoon the sun appears, and with the help of a neighbour — the genial Mr Fujitomi — they disentangle an old pine tree from where it has fallen across the canes and netting of the fruit garden. Yuji is back in his dried clothes. He offers to start sawing the tree up, and for two hours, until his fingers blister, he cuts clumsily through the pale wood while seeing, from the corner of his eye, Grandfather and Sonoko repairing the beds, bending and straightening like a pair of wading birds on the mudflats.

He is invited to stay the night. He telephones Father. ‘Saburo’s back,’ says Father.

‘Yes,’ says Yuji.

‘You knew?’

‘Yes.’

‘It might,’ says Father, ‘be wise to pay a call when you come home.’

Grandfather goes to bed at ten. Yuji has a mattress in the eight-mat room. He has hoped that his work with the saw, the good air he has breathed, might bring him an early sleep, but he sits up on his own by the light of a Blanchard lamp, a bowl of tea cooling on the mat beside him, and looks past the part-open screens to where beams of blue moonlight are falling through the darker blue of the trees. For a while he is troubled by visions of the umbrella lurching towards him through the storm, of that stooped figure probing the ground with his crutch. Then — some effect of the moonlight, the stillness, the hour — his mind quietens, his thoughts descend like water into the earth, and when it seems he is quite empty (his body a presence loosely wrapped around his breath), he feels it again — distinctly, though less intensely — the same sweet unhappiness he knew that evening in the taxi beside Alissa. What is it this time? Another memory? Of what? Mother again? No, not Mother. Who, then? He stares at the weave of the matting by his knees, brings before his mental gaze a dozen different faces, Momoyo to Junzo, tests them, then gives it up, sips his tea, and immediately, in its fragrance, the faint bitterness of its savour, finds the answer . .

Love. A love of this. The room, the light, the shadows, the singing of the insects, the tea, the rain-scoured air. A love of his country. Or if not that exactly — the phrase is too often in the mouths of the worst people — then love for a place he has always known, always, even in its convulsions, understood perfectly, a place he could never abandon without ceasing, in some way, to be Yuji Takano. Yet tonight it is almost as though he is experiencing it for the last time, gazing back at it from the stern of a boat, the line of the coast melting into the horizon. .

Is he, at twenty-six, falling into that cast of mind — regretful, elegiac — better suited to a man twice or three times his age, a man of Grandfather’s years? It is easy to affect such things, to wear them insincerely. But tonight he does feel old, as old as one of those broken pots Father pores over illustrations of in the garden study. Hiroshi in his airman’s uniform, Junzo no longer like himself, Taro bent with anxious labour, Oki, Shozo . . How many of them will see thirty? How many will be left when it’s over? Next month, by government decree, all the dance halls in Japan will close their doors for the duration of the struggle. The Harlem, The Tokyo Follies, The Big Ben, The Eastern Empire . . Piece by piece, life is being put away. To make more room for death? So that death can tour Japan in a black Mercedes, waving a gloved hand to the people lining the streets, their necks stretched out in readiness?

And what if he refuses it? What if he is the nail that cannot be hammered in? How, in this world he has been given but never asked for, does one make plans to survive?

For a week he manages to avoid paying his visit to the Kitamura house, and might, had he not sat so unguardedly on the verandah for half an hour flicking through his latest find at the Kanda bookstalls (a tattered but serviceable copy of Ciné-Journal, Sarah Bernhardt on the cover), have put off the meeting a few days more. He is reading a review of Pathé’s Le Coupable when he hears a whistle — short, low, and of such shocking familiarity he immediately feels a violent contraction of his heart that for two seconds dims the daylight around him. He closes the magazine, rolls it, and goes to the gap in the fence. Saburo — a face-wide strip of him — is waiting there, one hand holding a young black cat against his chest. The other hand, though not in view, is presumably clenched round the cross-strut of a crutch.

‘Welcome home,’ says Yuji. ‘I am sorry you have suffered a misfortune.’

‘Misfortune? I’ve lost half my foot, but now I can lie back and watch the others sweat. I’m going to enjoy it.’ He is smiling, an eager, open smile, but the face is no longer the one in the picture the old woman sighed over. Something has happened to Saburo, something that cannot be explained by the mutilation of a foot.

‘I was coming to see you,’ says Yuji.

‘Everybody else has already been.’

‘I was at Grandfather’s, and then . .’

‘Granny says your father’s friends are keeping you out of the army.’

‘My chest . .’

‘Ah! The famous chest!’

‘It’s probably only a matter of time.’

‘Probably? I’d say definitely.’

‘You made it to corporal, then?’

‘You know, I’ve only been back a week and already I’m sick of the prattling of women. Though sometimes Granny has interesting things to say. Surprising things, in fact.’

‘You heard about Ozono?’

‘No one to take over the brush business now.’

‘No.’

‘I bet the box they got back was empty. They usually are.’

‘The box?’

‘Of ashes. Most of them are empty.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘What were you reading? Show me.’

Yuji, unrolling the magazine, holds it up. Saburo frowns at it. ‘You could get into trouble with something like that,’ he says.

‘It’s just about films.’

‘It’s not Japanese, though, is it?’

‘No.’

‘You’ve got your father’s disease.’

‘Father doesn’t have a disease.’

‘I don’t mean a real disease.’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘How touchy you are!’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Would it surprise you to know I often thought of you over there?’

‘You did?’

‘We could have had some fun, you and me. I could have shown you things.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Oh, I’d have to whisper them to you. You’d have to push your head through the fence.’

‘It was kind of you to think of me.’

‘I can’t really talk to the women in there. But I can’t escape from them either. Not with this.’ He tilts his head to indicate the crutch, the cut limb. Yuji nods. Despite what he sees in the other’s eyes, he pities him. ‘I’m going to have a special boot made. The front half will be filled with wood. There’s a place in Sendagi. A workshop that makes wooden parts for soldiers.’

‘A special boot would be good, I suppose.’

‘Lucky I got married before, eh? What kind of a wife do you think I’d get like this? Women don’t want a man with a piece missing. Not unless he’s rich.’

‘Is that cat one of the litter?’

‘The only one to survive. I had to give Kyoko a bit of a dressing-down, army style, when I found that out.’

‘It might have been difficult to have helped the others.’

‘You’re sticking up for her?’

‘The cat could have gone somewhere secret to have the kittens.’

‘What do you know about cats?’

‘I’m not an expert.’

‘That’s right. You’re not an expert.’

‘It’s good that one survived.’

‘It needs a name though, don’t you think?’

‘Doesn’t it have one already?’

‘It’s my cat. I’m the only one who can give it a name.’

‘Have you chosen one?’

‘Mmm, I’m not sure. I thought’ — he furrows his brow in a clumsy mime of consideration — ‘I thought “Foreign Girl” might be good.’

‘A strange name for a cat.’

‘I told you Granny had been telling me interesting things.’

‘Some of them might not be quite accurate.’

‘Then why are you blushing?’

‘I’m not.’

‘You’re red as a cherry.’

‘Let’s forget about it.’

‘And what if I don’t want to forget about it?’

‘I’m only saying we could talk about something else.’

‘Then let’s talk about how grateful you are for my sacrifice. About how you’re going to show your gratitude.’

‘We’re all grateful.’

‘Look at you with your stupid magazine! You talk like you’re somebody and I’m nobody.’

‘No,’ says Yuji, quietly. ‘I’m nobody. You’re a war hero.’

‘That’s right. A returning hero.’

‘Yes. A returning hero.’

‘A veteran.’

‘Yes.’

‘Tried and tested.’

‘Yes.’

‘Think you can tell me what to do?’

‘No.’

‘So who gives the orders?’

‘You. Of course.’

‘I’m just pleased to see you again, Takano.’

‘I’m pleased to see you.’

‘You were my right-hand man when we were kids. You could be that again if you wanted.’

‘I remember it,’ says Yuji.

‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be kids again? Even for a day?’

‘Yes. I suppose.’

‘We were free then. Not a care in the world. And now . .’ He lifts the cat, nuzzling its head with the point of his chin. The animal mews, drowsily. ‘Time for Foreign Girl to have some milk,’ he says. ‘Though not any cream. Cream’s bad for their livers. You can kill a cat with cream.’

‘Yes?’

They look at each other, intimate as criminals, as lovers.

‘It’s you and me against the rest,’ says Saburo, starting, with little precarious movements, little grunts of effort, to turn himself round. ‘You and me against the women . .’

11

On Father’s birthday, Yuji presents him with an envelope containing a dozen steel needles for the gramophone.

‘If you were concerned about disturbing anyone, you could listen in the garden study.’

‘Listen to jazz?’

‘Wouldn’t you like to hear King Oliver again?’

‘Hmm. The New Orleans sound. You played it for the child, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. She was quite a good dancer.’

‘A child’s spirit is light. Jazz needs a light spirit. Dancing too, of course.’

‘You told me once that Mother was a good dancer.’

‘It’s true. We used to go to clubs in the Low City, even after Ryuichi was born. Dancing was one thing that did not seem to fatigue her.’ He smiles. ‘And we too had light spirits then.’

In the evening, Kushida comes for supper. He is wearing a field cap and a civil defence jacket, though the jacket, unlike most of the others Yuji has seen, has a neat and tailored appearance, more staff officer than front-line soldier. He apologises for it, feigns embarrassment, and explains that he had to attend a meeting of his local neighbourhood association — new directives on fire-fighting. As one of the senior people, he was, unfortunately, required to stay until the end. It had gone on so long he had not had time to return home and change.

Miyo brings in the sake flasks from the brass heater in the kitchen. They are sitting at the table in the Western room. The doors are part open to the muggy air. On a corner of the dresser, a coil of acrid-smelling mosquito repellent burns in a saucer. The birthday menu has been chosen by Mother (another of those household traditions that feel, somehow, spectral). This year it is a dish of chicken and garlic that she must, in the remote past, have instructed Haruyo how to make to an acceptable standard.

‘I suppose we should be drinking wine with it,’ says Father, ‘but I thought you’d prefer sake.’

‘You are quite right,’ says Kushida. ‘I imagine Yuji has more experience in drinking wine than either of us old men.’

‘Not really,’ says Yuji.

‘No?’

‘Not really.’

Though it is Haruyo who has prepared the food, Yuji manages to persuade himself that what is on his plate comes directly from Mother’s hands, and he eats it, the slightly stringy chicken, with good appetite. He wishes he was alone with Father, or that Grandfather was there, Grandfather and Uncle Kensuke. He wishes they were talking about jazz, that they were drinking wine. (Red or white with chicken? Sweet? Dry?) When he remembers the wine he drank at the Snow Goose, the bottle divided between two languages, he is surprised — startled, even — to discover that the memory now provokes only pleasure, and has, through some unobserved activity of time, completely lost its residue of high anxiety.

At the end of the table, Kushida and Father are at their usual game, sifting names out of the ashes of the past, out of the class of 1911, and holding them up to desultory inspection. Nakiyama has published his study of Clausewitz. Tamura is on Prince Konoe’s new political order committee. Kuroda’s son is making his fortune in Tientsin, the construction business, army contracts mostly. Ayukawa, for reasons that remain obscure, is divorcing his wife.

Listening to them, watching them as he finishes his food, Yuji tries (again) to guess at Father’s true feelings for the doctor. If they did not have Imperial, what would they talk about? There is nothing in their manner together to suggest any deep regard, any affinity beyond the historical coincidence of going up to the university together thirty years ago. Are they really such good friends? Or is possible that Father has kept up the alliance for the sake of Mother, for the foreign medicines in the clinic dispensary and, later, for those headed letters to the War Ministry, one of which found its way into Captain Mori’s folder? If there was no need for Dr Kushida, would he be here at all?

A rumble of thunder. A gust of wind blows the doors wide. Yuji gets up and pushes them shut. A minute later it starts to rain, heavily.

‘There was a mudslide at a village in Shikoku,’ says Kushida. ‘A whole family buried alive. Did you read about it?’

‘You’ll need a car to get home,’ says Father. He sends Miyo to call the garage. She hurries off. The phone excites her. (She would, she has confided to Yuji, like to work at the Central Telephone Exchange — she is already old enough — and demonstrated for him, in a voice she had found who knows where, how she would ask the caller, ‘What number do you wish to be connected to?’)

‘Is it true your neighbour is back?’ asks Kushida.

‘Yes,’ says Father. ‘He was unfortunate enough to suffer an injury. A blister that became infected. They had to remove part of his foot.’

‘An amputation?’

‘Yes.’

‘One can never really be safe as a soldier. Not out there, certainly.’

When the taxi sounds its horn, Kushida extinguishes his cigarette and pulls on the khaki jacket. ‘Could Yuji take an umbrella out for me? If I use my own, it will drip in the car and the driver will grumble. They don’t need much encouragement.’

Yuji selects an umbrella from among the dozen in the square pot in the vestibule, then waits under the porch roof for the doctor to finish his goodbyes to Father. When he comes out, they hurry across the garden, through the gate. The taxi’s headlights are two converging cones of rain. At the door of the car, Kushida turns and says, ‘A pity about your Frenchman.’

‘My Frenchman?’

‘Yes. What’s his name? Fabien?’

‘Feneon?’

‘Feneon, of course.’

‘Has something happened?’

‘A little visit from the authorities.’

‘What sort of visit?’

‘Oh, I don’t have the details. It was the Higher Police, I think, the Tokko. A colleague at the hospital in Kanda mentioned it. I thought you might be interested.’ He opens the door, lowers himself onto the seat. ‘I noticed tonight how much healthier you are looking. The way you ate your food was hardly like an invalid, was it?’

He shuts the door. His shadow leans towards the driver, then the car moves off, cautiously, into the dark.

12

When Feneon opens the door, he looks, thinks Yuji, like a man who has sat up all night reading some weighty, some impenetrable volume, something that exhausts both eyes and brain. He scans the street, then reaches out, takes Yuji’s arm, and draws him inside, shutting the door behind them.

‘You should not be here,’ he says. ‘It is perfectly likely they have someone watching the house.’

‘If so,’ says Yuji, ‘it must already be too late.’

‘Who did you hear from?’

‘An acquaintance of Father’s. A man called Kushida.’

‘Kushida? I don’t think I know him. Though I am remembering now what I was perhaps foolish to forget. I mean how visible I am. Any foreigner.’ He is speaking French to Yuji but uses the Japanese word for foreigner — gaijin — filling both its syllables with a still-raw anger. Then he shuts his eyes, breathes, opens his eyes, and leads Yuji to the doorway of the salon, pausing there for him to take in the room’s chaos.

‘It’s the same all over the house. Thank God Alissa was away.’

‘She’s away?’

‘Yes. Somewhere safe.’

‘But she knows?’

He shakes his head. ‘It was only two days ago. And with things as they are it might be better if she remains in ignorance.’

He goes through to the study. Yuji follows, unable for the moment to tell if he is relieved to find Alissa absent again or disappointed.

‘I made a start in here. Put the desk drawers back, began to collect the papers they scattered, but after a few minutes I felt like poor Sisyphus with his rock. They took the projector. They seemed delighted to have found it. And the films too, of course. I hope they watch them. Who knows what effect a dose of Chaplin might have on those horribly rigid minds.’

‘It was the Tokko?’

‘Oh, yes. All plain clothes and the sort of swagger that comes from not being answerable in the usual way. Not being required to explain or excuse anything.’

For half a minute Yuji joins him in a defeated silence then, roused by pangs of shame that he, a Japanese, is inescapably implicated in this desecration, this act of the horribly rigid minds, he asks, firmly, that he be allowed to put the house in order again.

‘To clean up? I suppose we might do something. I can hardly leave it like this, eh? And I don’t think I shall be seeing Hanako again.’

‘They detained her?’

‘No, no. In fact, I had the impression she was not at all surprised to see them. A question of loyalties, no doubt.’

They begin where they are, lifting the Buddha back to his niche by the door, furling the antique scrolls, setting the dragon pipes in their rack again. The books, as Yuji gathers them reverently from the floor, seem, in the trembling of their pages, to possess some knowledge of their recent treatment. From one of them, a Maison Gallimard edition of Anna Karenina, a piece of lilac paper flutters to the floor. When Yuji picks it up it’s obviously a letter. He passes it to Feneon, who scans a few lines of the small precise handwriting and shakes his head.

‘Not the one you were hoping for, I’m afraid. This is from a young woman I met before the war. The last war.’ He holds the letter out between two fingers. ‘Put her back with Anna and Vronsky. She’s been in there so long they must all have become good friends by now.’

They are nearly two hours in the study. The salon, more spacious, less easy to ransack, is dealt with more quickly.

‘Can you believe that they searched the stove?’ says Feneon. ‘Perhaps they expected to find the charred remains of secret documents. One of them even took a photograph of it. I’m pleased to report the stove maintained a heroic silence.’

When the last lamp is righted and the crystal fragments of a broken eau de vie glass have been swept onto a sheet of newspaper and carefully wrapped, they go to the bottom of the stairs.

‘You won’t have been up here before,’ says Feneon. ‘That painting is of Sézanne. The very street I was born in. This house here. You see? I looked through those windows as a child without the slightest idea there might be a place in the world called Japan.’

They go into his room. In the daylight it is less plain, less sparely furnished than it appeared the last time Yuji saw it. At the foot of the open wardrobe is a man-thick heap of shirts, and sprawled beside them, like a shot ghost, is the goose-grey smoking jacket.

‘This they also photographed,’ says Feneon, nodding to the bed. ‘Really, when you think of it, it was the behaviour of lunatics.’ With his sleeve he rubs at one of the brass orbs on the footboard as if to remove from it the smudge of a policeman’s fingerprints, then he grimaces and presses at some stiffness in his neck. ‘I‘m too ancient for this kind of trouble,’ he says. ‘Let’s do Alissa’s room and then I’ll investigate the kitchen. See if I can find us some lunch.’

They go to the end of the corridor. Feneon opens the door wide. The light in there, pouring through a mesh of fine lace, is softer, dimmer, paler. If, thinks Yuji, following the Frenchman inside, if he turns and looks at me now, will he not see everything, know everything? But Feneon does not turn. He is reaching over the bed, smoothing the bedding, the quilt of ivory satin.

There are clothes on the floor. Yuji is not sure if he should touch them, but fearing stillness, how it might betray him, he scoops up an armful of silks and linens, and briefly, as he inhales the scent his pressing releases, his behaviour of that night, of the following morning, of all the nights and mornings since, seems like the actions of a man impossible to respect or like, a small-natured man whose timidity has made him cruel.

‘They wanted to take these,’ says Feneon, crossing to the dressing table and tidying the photographs. ‘I told them they would have to take me away with them. It seems they were not quite ready for that.’

He lifts one of the pictures and holds it out to Yuji. ‘Recognise anyone?’

‘Who could I recognise?’

‘The child?’

‘The face is so small . .’

‘It’s Alissa! The girl holding her was one of our servants in Saigon. When we came to leave she was inconsolable. You would have thought she was losing one of her own.’ He stares at the picture, then puts it back among the others. For a count of three, four seconds, he keeps his face averted. ‘We’re worn out,’ he says, at last. ‘Epuisé.’

They go down to the kitchen, a room that seems not to have held much interest for the Tokko. Feneon finds two eggs and puts them in a pan to boil. Yuji slices a large nashi pear left ripening on the windowsill. ‘And look,’ says Feneon, ‘half a loaf from the last decent bakery in Kanda. They bake for the Russian priests at the cathedral. I wonder what will become of those gentlemen.’

Rather than eat in the dining room, they sit at the little knife-scored table in the kitchen. They share a bottle of beer, clink glasses, though neither of them suggests a toast. When they have finished, Feneon sits back and wipes his lips, delicately, with the fat of his thumb.

‘Now,’ he says, ‘it’s time for you to leave, my friend. You have been very kind but I should not have let you stay so long. Is your bicycle at the front?’

Yuji nods.

‘You can go through the garden. There’s a gate behind the rose bush that leads into an alley. The gate is stiff but it works. The alley will take you back to the street. Don’t wait around. Just ride home. You understand? I’ll find some way of letting you know if I have to go away. We won’t lose each other. And tell the rest of them. No visits, for everyone’s safety, until this fever is over.’

They go to the kitchen door. Feneon pulls the bolts, opens the door cautiously and looks out.

‘The gate is straight ahead. You see? And when we meet again I expect you to have written a poem or two.’

‘I will try,’ says Yuji, taking the other’s proffered hand, feeling his own disappear into that large, dry grip.

‘Shall I give your regards to Alissa?’

‘Please.’

‘Go quickly now. Be very careful.’

‘And you, monsieur.’

Their hands part. Yuji, unsure if he is supposed to run or if running would simply draw attention to himself, begins to stride across the lawn. He does not look back, and as he passes the early afternoon shadows under the magnolia tree, he hears the sound of the kitchen door being shut again, shut and bolted.

13

He is squatting under the bulb in his room sewing a button onto a shirt. It’s midnight. A week has passed since he went through the gate behind the rose bush, a week since he cycled home, wind tears and tears of shame in his eyes. A week in which he has been left to wonder if his rashness — that blind eagerness to demonstrate his loyalty — might not have brought much closer the day his own house, his own family, will be visited by ‘the horribly rigid minds’. It is not hard to picture them, a gang in tight-fitting suits, chrysanthemum badges beneath the lapels of their jackets, rousting Mother from her room, harrying Father from his bed or his study. (And if he saw one lay a hand on Mother, grip her roughly, insult her perhaps, would he have the decency to attack that man?) He has even considered whether Kushida, knowing that his information would send him running down to Kanda, was setting a trap for him. Is that possible?

He is lost in these thoughts, biting the taut thread with his teeth, when he hears his name being called from the street. Once. Twice. A pause. Then a third time — a yowl like a cat on heat. He turns off the light, pads to the window. There are no cars out there, no crop-haired strangers under the lamps. Anyone at all? Did he dream that uncanny voice? Then he sees a movement, something crawling from the shadows outside Otaki’s, a creature of some sort, certainly not a cat, more like a giant turtle dragging itself out of the sea. It moves towards the house, stops, looks up, a man now, a man suddenly, his face livid with the glare of the lamp. Then the voice again, that anguished cry.

At the bottom of the stairs, Miyo is sat erect in her bedding. No sign of Father yet, no Haruyo. He pushes on a pair of sandals, the first his fingers can find, and runs through the garden to the street. Kyoko is already out there, and behind her, at an embarrassed distance, Otaki, carrying the crutch and gabbling about how Mr Kitamura was most insistent, and really, what else could he do but keep serving him, a veteran after all, a distinguished veteran.

Saburo is lying, perfectly still, on his back, but his eyes are open, and when he sees Yuji he smiles. ‘Comrade! Knew I could count on you. Knew you would come.’

He shakes off his wife, stretches up, clutches Yuji’s hand (almost pulling him over), hauls himself onto his one and a half feet, breathes deeply, looks briefly victorious, and immediately collapses to the ground again. A second attempt is more successful. He wraps an arm round Yuji’s neck, and the four of them, wedded to the drunken man’s movements, teeter towards the old woman’s gate. A dozen times Saburo stops to rage about the bastards who ‘butchered him’, or to ask, urgently, if Yuji remembers so-and-so from school, the kid with the big ears, or the one who cried a lot, or the one who, for half a sweet-bean cake, drank his own piss.

Grandma Kitamura is waiting for them with a lantern and a blanket. She tries to drape the blanket over Saburo’s shoulders but he shrugs it off, irritably. ‘Look,’ he says to Yuji, touching the tabard he is wearing, the padded cotton waistcoat written over with what, by the lantern light, Yuji can now decipher as verses from the Lotus Sutra. ‘Without this I would have been killed a hundred times. A thousand! “Oh, Buddha of sublime nature and unequalled power” . . Go to bed, Granny. You’ — he points at Kyoko — ‘heat sake. We have a guest, in case you hadn’t noticed. An old friend has called.’

‘Would it be better to sleep now?’ asks Yuji, softly. ‘After all, we could talk in the morning. We—’

Saburo tightens his arm round Yuji’s neck. He laughs. ‘I can’t hear a word you’re saying.’

In a room at the back of the house, Kyoko puts out two sitting cushions, switches on the electric kotatsu, which immediately gives off a strange smell of burning. Yuji has not been in this room for years. The matting is frayed, the paper screens split and taped, the alcove, apart from an empty vase, bare.

Saburo sits, dragging Yuji with him. For a moment Saburo seems to lose consciousness, but then he looks up, shakes his head like a dazed boxer, and takes the unsmoked half of an army-ration cigarette from behind his ear. He gives Yuji the lighter, cups Yuji’s hands in his own, and several times comes close to setting his eyelashes ablaze. In front of them, the damaged foot is on show, wrapped in a pinned sock. Kyoko brings in the sake. She pours, and puts the flask on the kotatsu. As she stands to leave she glances at Yuji, quickly shakes her head. He does not know what it means. A warning of some kind? (Get out as soon as you can!) Or is it to tell him that the bruise beside her eye, the greenish shadow the powder cannot entirely hide, is not there because Saburo has learnt anything of the game they have played these last months, his idle pursuit of her, her idle acceptance of it. Is that what she means?

The moment they are alone, Saburo begins to speak, and though he sways from the waist and the nicotine-bright fingers round the cigarette are not quite steady, his voice come from a place the alcohol has not touched. Cannot touch, perhaps.

‘This,’ he says, his forehead almost grazing Yuji’s cheek, ‘will happen to you. Don’t bother fighting it. There’s nothing you can do.’

‘Do?’

‘When you come back, they won’t know you. They won’t want to know you. They won’t want to touch you.’ He draws on the cigarette, holds the smoke down, then lets it seep past his gritted teeth. ‘When I got my papers in ’36, they were still training soldiers properly. January to May at the depot, and not just square-bashing. We were cobblers, tailors, armourers, cooks . . I could strip down a Nambu and build it again in the time it would take you to eat a bowl of rice. A Japanese soldier had to know how to do everything! Fire a grenade-launcher? Yessir! Dig a latrine, read a map, march through the snow when you can’t feel your feet? Yessir! These days they give them a uniform and pack them straight off on the boat. Half of them still seasick when they get to camp. Real specimens! Worse than you, Takano. City scum. Village idiots. Can’t march, can’t fight. It’s left to us, NCOs, senior privates, to train them, and the only thing worth teaching them, the only thing we have time to teach them, is how to kill. Know how you do that? Eh? You get yourself a dozen Chink prisoners, line up the training squad, tell them if anyone looks away they’ll get their teeth knocked in, then pull out the nearest prisoner and stick him in the belly with a bayonet. The army bayonet is the Meiji type thirty. It is fifteen and a half inches long. Chinks are mostly skinny as you. Stick them right and you get eight, ten inches of steel out the other side. That’s what we want to see, we say, though in fact we’re usually trying not to piss ourselves laughing at the sight of their faces. Then the sergeant asks for a volunteer. And guess what? There’s always someone who wants a go, some mama’s boy who suddenly realises what he wants to do in life is jab a man in the guts. They all do it in the end, even the ones who look more scared than the Chinks they’re sticking. The next day when you line them up, they’re different. They’ve changed. There’s no going back then. It’s like . .’ He reaches out a weebling hand for his sake but the cup is too far away. He gives up.

‘Now, taking heads,’ he says, ‘that needs a bit of skill. Use too much force and you’ll make a mess of it, have them running all over the place like a chicken. Just keep it nice and calm, get the prisoner to kneel in front of you, pour a little water both sides of your blade, swish it off, lift the blade high, breathe out, breathe in . . let it fall. Do it properly, you hardly feel the contact. Head pops off. Two big fountains of blood. Body tumbles into a hole. You wipe your blade, try not to look too pleased with yourself. Officers have the best swords, of course. Old family swords, or ones they’ve been given as graduation presents. Beautiful, some of them. They don’t get knocked out of shape like an NCO’s blade. You can keep chopping for as long as you’ve got strength in your arms. I knew a pair of captains, decent sorts really, family men, who had a competition to see how many heads they could take in an hour. When they’d finished, they had themselves photographed standing by a mound of Chink heads, like it was some office golf tournament. You’ve heard of the “Three Alls”, Takano? Seize all, burn all, kill all. That’s the army’s motto. Seize all, burn all, kill all. And don’t tell me it makes any difference who you were before — if you were educated or you could hardly write your own name. The educated ones can be the worst, like when I was up in Shunsi Province. What a shit-hole that is. Me and Yasumizo escorting a pair of Chinks to the hospital. No idea who they were. Big one might have been a communist, had that look about him. The other was probably just some peasant they pulled off the fields to make up the numbers. Anyway, we took them along to the hospital and when we got there they said we were in the wrong place. Have to go to the school next door, they said. Gave us a funny look. Well, we went over there. Just an ordinary middle school but they’d set up a kind of operating theatre in one of the classrooms with a sign on the door that said, “Training”. The hospital director was there, a smug bastard called Nishimura, and a colonel from the medical service, and about six doctors, just arrived from the home islands by the look of them, all hoping to impress the brass. Anyway, we handed over our prisoners. The big Chink lay down on the bed without any trouble, but the other, the little one, he starts crying at the top of his lungs. “Ai-ai-ai-ai!” One orderly was pulling him, another pushing, but he was stronger than he looked and he knew what was coming. In the end it was the nurse who got him on the trolley. She could speak a few words of Chinese, and though she was only young she talked to him like she was his mama, patted his hand, nodded and smiled at him right until the moment one of the doctors rolled him over and gave him a jab in the spine. Tell you the truth, I’d have been happy to go then, have a smoke outside, but when you’re a soldier no one cares what you want. You’re not even a human being any more. Just a tool. Pick up, put down, throw away. So we stayed, me and Yasumizo, in a corner of the classroom, scruffs from the infantry. “Now, then, gentlemen,” says the colonel, “shall we start with the appendix?” I remember that. Shall we start with the appendix? Like he was ordering something at a restaurant. Well, those doctors must have been hungry ’cause they jumped to it. Ever seen an appendix? Doesn’t look like much. Sort of thing you might use for fishing bait. Then they really got busy. Cut off the little peasant’s arms, made a hole in the big Chink’s throat. They were all chatting away, and when one of them made a mistake, got his nice white coat splashed, they all looked at each other and laughed. They cut off the Chinks’ balls. I don’t know what for. Science, I suppose. At the end of it the little peasant was good and dead but the other one was still breathing, a sort of “heh, heh, heh” noise. The colonel ordered one of the doctors to inject air into his heart but that didn’t work so two of them tried to strangle him with a piece of string. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t just cut off his head. They’d cut off everything else and it wasn’t like they didn’t have enough knives in there. Then this old non-com medic, you know the type, bows and says, “Honourable doctors, if you inject him with anaesthesia, he’ll die.” So they do it and he dies and they all go off to wash their hands and have a drink while me and Yasumizo put what’s left of our prisoners into a pit in the old playground. A big moon that night. The pit was as big as your garden. Stank like a tanning factory . .’

From between his fingers the long-since-extinguished cigarette tumbles to the mat. He whispers something, some unintelligible protest, then at last falls silent, his weight pressing more and more heavily against Yuji’s shoulder. After a minute the door slides open. The women come in. They have the bedding with them and swiftly, speechlessly, as though it has now a familiar routine, they lift the sleeping man and lie him in it. The old woman starts to undress him. Yuji follows Kyoko out of the room. She comes with him as far as the street gate. ‘He’s ill,’ she says in a whisper. ‘The wound keeps opening. Those things . . Please, pay no attention.’

‘You’ve heard them?’

‘He’s ill,’ she says. ‘And when he drinks . .’

‘You think they’re not true?’

‘True?’

‘The stories?’

She shakes her head. ‘I have to go in,’ she says. ‘I have to go in now.’

‘You’ll be needing this,’ he says, taking the crutch from where Otaki has left it propped against the gate. He hands it to her as tenderly as he can, as though it was a spray of plum blossom. She thanks him, clutches it across her breasts, and scurries inside.

14

‘What did he want?’ asks Father, coming from his room and stopping Yuji at the top of the stairs the following morning.

‘I don’t know,’ says Yuji. ‘He was drunk.’

‘I see,’ says Father, ‘Hmm.’

Yuji waits. Is that it? Can he go? He does not want to repeat what he has heard, to say (standing in the morning shadows at the top of the stairs) that their neighbour is an expert in decapitation, or that Japanese doctors in China behave like the criminally insane. Whatever Kyoko might wish to think he is sure the stories are true. Saburo hasn’t the imagination to invent such things.

‘He’s brought it back with him,’ says Father.

‘What?’

‘The war.’

‘Yes.’

‘I pity him.’

‘Yes.’

‘I never liked him, but even so.’

‘Yes, even so.’

‘To lose both parents while still a child. A hard beginning.’

‘When you were in the army, Father . .’

‘It was 1913. There was no war.’

‘I know. But what did you do?’

‘Tried not to die of boredom.’

‘That’s all?’

‘Studied when I could. Played a lot of shogi.’

‘It wasn’t so bad, then?’

‘Stay on the right side of Kushida, Yuji. I’ll do what I can.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Ishihara’s group. Can they help you? I imagine they have better connections than I do. Now, at least.’

‘You would approve of me accepting their help?’

Father starts down the stairs. ‘I might,’ he says over his shoulder, ‘prefer it to having you howl in the street at night. Your mother certainly would.’

15

The money from Hideo Makiyama has dwindled to a handful of small change. The screenplay, which one day might bring him a hundred yen or more, is just a single sheet of paper with a single unfilmable scene about a boy flying to the heart of the sun. The last handout from Grandfather went on new boots for the coming winter. As for the banknotes Uncle Kensuke pressed into his hand at the station, he cannot account for them at all. Books? Beer?

It is time to see old Horikawa again, to sit at the window, look at trains and drink coffee. After his efforts to write ‘something exalted, something delirious’ he should have no difficulty scratching a few lines in praise of shipping companies or toothpaste. He sets off for Hibaya, cool early October sunshine on the back of his neck, but when he reaches the building and walks up the broken wax tiling of the stairs, the office door is shut and locked. There is no sign on it, no ‘Back in an hour’ or ‘Closed for reasons of ill health’. He goes down to the repair shop, calls a greeting, steps inside. The shop is a nest, a densely packed hive of bicycles — new, old, wheels on, wheels off. They even hang from the ceiling, clusters of them suspended from hooks. He calls again, gets no reply. The concrete floor is dotted with flowers of oil. Behind a curtain at the back of the shop, an infant is wailing, methodically. He goes back upstairs, writes a note on a scrap of paper and slips it under the door, then, with nothing better to do, he eats under the railway line, an elbow-to-elbow place where every time a train rumbles overhead the surface of his broth breaks into delicate ripples.

After eating (and it’s true what Kushida said, his appetite is better these days, he is healthier, so much so he has once or twice seriously considered taking up smoking), he walks to the park and squats on a grass bank beneath a maple tree to read the paper. The delegation who signed the pact in Berlin have arrived home. Prince Konoe and senior members of the government have expressed their gratitude. The Fifth Division has entered Hanoi. The people there have welcomed them as elder brothers, though in the photographs the people are just shapes in the margin, out of focus. The back page of the paper shows a woman modelling the new monpe trousers at the Matsuya department store. The trousers are a synthesis of fashion and the national will. They are elegant, perfectly modest, but leave the legs free for the physical labour all sections of society must now be prepared to take part in . .

He folds the paper, discards it at the first bench he passes, and returns to the building. The office is still locked, and now, downstairs, the steel grille of the repair shop is shut and chained. Is there some local holiday? A neighbourhood kami of good profits, a Buddha of low taxes to be venerated? He looks at his watch. Almost half past three. On Tuesday afternoons the Montparnasse in Asakusa shows half-price double-bills of British, French or American films. If he can get there in time, then the day will not have been wasted. He scribbles another note to Horikawa, hurries to the stop opposite the Imperial Theatre, takes a cross-town bus to the Kannon Temple, then jogs the 500 yards to the cinema.

‘Make the most of it,’ says Mr Suzuki, the manager of the Montparnasse, sitting in his white suit in the ticket booth. ‘From now on I’m just showing jidaigeki pictures. Noble warriors, women with no eyebrows, lovely costumes . .’

‘Haven’t you said that before?’ asks Yuji, wheezing from his run, and looking past the manager’s head at the posters for Stagecoach and Pépé le Moko.

‘I mean it,’ says the manager, snipping Yuji’s ticket from the roll. ‘This foreign stuff will get me shut down. Or worse. The next time you see me I’ll have a samourai topknot. You’ll think I’m one of the Forty-seven Ronin.’

In the little auditorium thirty, perhaps forty customers are waiting on seats of frayed green plush. A few couples, but mostly men on their own, amateurs of cinema — some in uniform — who find at the Montparnasse what the sushi tsu find at Kawashima’s. Yuji takes a seat at the end of a row halfway back. There is a short wait while Suzuki moves from the ticket booth to the projection room (they can hear his footsteps, his weary tread on the stairs), then the newsreel begins — trumpets, eagles, a spinning globe. They stand for the Emperor, sit again, polish glasses, light cigarettes, and bend towards the screen, lean like divers at the edge of a glittering pool.

Three hours later, sated, they file outside, blinking in the blue and gold of early evening. Yuji loiters at the kerb, his atoms dispersed between the deserts of New Mexico and the labyrinth of the Kasbah. He is staring, with vacant intensity, at a board outside the confectionary shop on the other side of the narrow street. There is a painting on the board of the seasonal delicacy ‘autumn comes to the treetops’, and he is wondering what Ringo Kid — a man who gallops through treeless landscapes — might make of such a delicacy (would he buy some for a sweetheart?), when a customer, a woman, a slight figure in a blue and white kimono, comes out of the shop and stops directly opposite him.

‘Mr Takano?’

‘Mrs Yamaguchi!’

‘What a surprise to see you here.’

Students on bicycles glide between them, then two taxis full of young geishas, shamisen cases on their laps. He crosses the street. She waits for him, neat as a doll, in her hands a box of sweets wrapped in paper decorated with autumn flowers — dahlias, amaranths.

‘I was at the cinema,’ says Yuji.

‘The Montparnasse?’

‘Yes.’

‘What a nice way to spend the afternoon. What did you see?’

He tells her (‘Gabin is a favourite of mine,’ she says), and then, to defend himself against the charge no one has made, the accusation that he is the sort of young man who spends the day in cinemas instead of taking part in the physical labour even fashionable woman are preparing for, he gives an absurdly detailed reprise of his day — the failed search for Horikawa, his inability to find even the mechanic who would surely have been able to tell him where Horikawa was — an account she listens to intently and with just the faintest smile on her lips.

‘And the dance school?’ he asks, blushing and scowling at the paving stone between their feet.

She thanks him for his kind enquiry. It is not, she explains, a time favourable to an enterprise such as hers, but she has been able to keep a few of her older students, the professionals mostly. The others, one by one, have dropped away. She was particularly sorry not to have Mademoiselle Feneon any more.

‘Alissa?’

‘We have not seen her since the rainy season, though she wrote a most polite letter. I hope her ill health is no longer troubling her?’

‘She’s away,’ says Yuji, quickly.

‘In the country, perhaps?’

‘Yes. In the country.’

‘For a foreigner she danced very well.’

‘She did?’

‘Oh, yes. You should have seen her dancing “Snow”. Really, a quite unexpected poise.’

‘I have heard her play the piano. When she plays Chopin, it’s as good as the radio.’

Mrs Yamaguchi nods, amused again. ‘I hope you find your business acquaintance,’ she says.

‘My . .?’

‘The man you were looking for?’

‘Oh . . yes. Thank you.’

She bows and moves away, pigeon-toed, her dancer’s back straight as a board above the immaculately tied obi. Then she turns — sinks it seems — into one of the alleys that wind like waterless streams down towards the river.

A polite letter? Ill health? What else did the letter say? And if Alissa was ill, why had Feneon not spoken of it? What sort of illness? A serious one?

He recrosses the street. Outside the Montparnasse a small queue is forming for the evening showing. Suzuki is in his booth again, scissors and tickets at the ready. And something — the white of his suit, perhaps — brings unbidden to Yuji’s mind the Hitomaro lines Alissa recited in the moonlit study: ‘One morning like a bird she was gone in the white scarves of death.’

And then? Something about a child, who cries for her, who she left behind . .

He looks towards the alley where Mrs Yamaguchi disappeared. If he ran, he might catch up with her, stop her, question her. What she doesn’t know she will be able to guess, a woman like her. Who else can he ask now that Feneon’s house is forbidden to him? He bites his lip, stares as though staring would bring her back, draw her to him. Then he looks down, walks to the wall beside the cinema, and quietly takes his place at the end of the queue.