One Morning Like a Bird

1

Meetings of the local neighbourhood association are held in Otaki’s noodle bar, a familiar space — gloomy, savoury, endearingly scuffed — where nobody’s intimate domestic life need be exposed to the curiosity of his neighbours. There has not been a meeting since the irises were in flower. Then — at the firm request of the Home Ministry — associations from Okinawa to Hokkaido, gathered to discuss how they might contribute more to the national struggle, what they might cut back on, what they could do without, how, in this particular hour of destiny, they might, somehow, be better neighbours to each other.

This evening’s meeting, twilight, the second week of November, is also at the exhortation of the ministry. A new guide has been issued, a booklet with the imperial standard on the cover, and inside, in numbered paragraphs, a list of the duties all loyal subjects must be ready to perform. Through the neighbourhood associations (the national defence women’s groups, the Great Japan youth associations, the patriotic workers committees), every man and woman in the home islands will be welded into a single disciplined force. Everyone will have his place. Everyone will wait on the Emperor’s word, ready, should the order come, for the ‘smashing of the jewels’ — the final sacrificial battle. There’s a new slogan, the winning entry in a competition run by the Asahi newspaper. ‘Abolish desire until victory!’ Associations could, if they wished, shout this heartily at the conclusion of their meetings. Such behaviour, the booklet suggested, was in the interests of everyone.

Yuji, who has been delivering cigarettes to a beer hall in Shibuya with Mr Fujitomi and the blue Nissan, is the last to arrive. He nods his apologies to his neighbours, takes his place beside Father.

‘You saw him today?’ whispers Father.

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘Sonoko says his appetite is improving.’

‘And his movement?’

‘Not yet.’

The men are ranged around a long low table at the back of the restaurant. Otaki, Itaki, Ozono, old Mr Kawabata, Mr Kiyama the wedding photographer, Father, Yuji. Saburo is at the top of the table, his crutch angled against the wall behind him. He is, apparently, in full uniform. He has a medal on his chest, the Wound Medal (Second Class). Of the others, three of them — Itaki, Otaki and Mr Kiyama — are in civil defence jackets. Behind the curtain, in the kitchen, Otaki’s wife and sister are preparing refreshments for the end of the meeting. The only other woman present, kneeling in the obscurity by the door, is Grandma Kitamura.

‘I suppose,’ says Otaki, clearing his throat, ‘we should make a start?’ He glances at Father, the disgraced but still august professor of law, a man to whom the procedures of meetings must be almost second nature, but Father keeps his gaze on the tabletop.

‘It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?’ says Otaki, and laughs with embarrassment.

Yuji looks over at Saburo. Saburo is staring at him. Yuji looks away.

‘It seems,’ continues Otaki, doubtfully, ‘we have to make some decisions?’

‘An auspicious day for it,’ says the wedding photographer.

‘Indeed,’ says Itaki, reverently inclining his head. ‘The two-thousand-six-hundredth anniversary of the Empire!’

‘Have you seen the pavilion outside the palace?’ asks the photographer.

Yuji has seen it through the window of the Nissan. An immense and lavishly decorated tent, the centrepiece of the week’s celebrations, radiant in the November sunshine. Crowds of police, crowds of soldiers . .

‘All the big ones will be there,’ says the photographer. ‘Prince Konoe, General Tojo, Admiral Nagano . .’

‘Imagine the food,’ says Itaki, sighing. ‘Though they say the Empress will never open her mouth in public.’

‘I’ve heard that myself,’ says the photographer. ‘The thought of such modesty moved me greatly.’ He straightens his back. His face takes on an expression of awed contemplation.

After a respectful interval (briefly disturbed by Mr Kawabata excusing himself and tottering away towards the toilet), Otaki holds up the ministry booklet. ‘There’s quite a lot in it,’ he says. ‘I was quite surprised.’

‘The most important thing,’ says Itaki, whose civil defence jacket is obviously home-dyed, and recently too, for some of the dye, a curious dun colour, has rubbed off on his wrists, ‘is to elect a block captain. No?’

The wedding photographer nods vigorously. Yuji has heard nothing of this. A block captain? He scans his neighbours’ faces, seeing, on at least three of them, the nervous smirks of schoolboy conspirators.

‘When you think about,’ says Otaki, ‘it should be someone with experience.’

‘I agree,’ says Itaki. ‘But someone with the right experience.’ He looks at Saburo and grins.

‘And a cool head,’ says the photographer. ‘Wouldn’t that be important?’

‘Certainly,’ says Otaki, now, like the other two, casting shy glances at the lounging figure at the top of the table.

‘Professor Takano,’ drawls Saburo, watching the smoke of his cigarette flowing in slow blue waves from between his outstretched fingers, ‘is the most educated man here . .’

Father looks up. ‘Quite impossible,’ he says, addressing Otaki in a voice that invites no further discussion.

‘Is it a position for a younger man?’ asks Otaki, flustered.

‘Perhaps you are right,’ says Saburo. ‘In which case, the professor’s son would be a good candidate. Isn’t it true,’ he says, smiling at Yuji, ‘that you’re a few months younger than me?’

‘It’s true,’ says Yuji. ‘But I wonder if my experience is really suitable.’

‘The difficulty,’ answers Saburo, ‘is knowing what your experience really is.’

The photographer giggles.

‘His experience,’ says Father, ‘is more varied than you might imagine. How many of us here, for example, can speak another language, fluently, as Yuji does?’

‘Is it Chinese?’ asks Saburo, jutting his head forwards. ‘Chinese is the language he’ll need soon.’

Mr Kawabata returns from the toilet. ‘Hardly a drop,’ he mutters, knee joints cracking as he takes his place on the mat. ‘And yet I felt I needed it.’

‘But what about you?’ asks Itaki, bowing and addressing Saburo as ‘honourable soldier’.

‘Wouldn’t you consider it?’ adds Otaki.

‘We would really feel we had the right person,’ says the photographer.

‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ asks Saburo, one finger tapping the Wound Medal.

‘But you move around like a cat,’ says Itaki.

‘Really, it’s remarkable,’ says Kiyama.

‘The truth,’ says Saburo, ‘is that my vote was going to be for Mr Ozono. He has made the greatest sacrifice. Shouldn’t we show our appreciation of it by offering the position to him?’

Ozono blushes. ‘Like the professor,’ he says, ‘it would be quite awkward, at this moment, to accept such a responsibility. If I still had Kenji to help in the shop, but . .’

‘You’re the perfect choice,’ says Itaki to Saburo. ‘Don’t you see?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Saburo. ‘There may be some people here who think I’m not up to it.’

‘Eh? Everybody has the greatest confidence in you,’ says Otaki, glancing eagerly around the table.

‘Everybody?’

‘Please,’ says Itaki. ‘You must let us insist.’

‘It’s embarrassing . .’ says Saburo. He waits. Is he counting off the seconds? Then he sighs as though some great burden is being lowered onto his shoulders. ‘But if you are going to insist, what can I say except I will try to serve you and His Sacred Majesty with all my strength. Just as I did in China.’

‘So you’ll do it?’ asks Otaki.

‘Abolish victory until the final desire!’ cries Mr Kawabata, his eyes tightly shut, his cheeks trembling with emotion.

Yuji looks over to the door. The old woman has leaned into the light so that it hangs in a yellow veil across her face. Seeing herself observed, she settles back on her haunches, steals her smile back into the shadows.

By eight thirty, swept along by a wave of satisfaction that the matter of the appointment (this irksome new post no honest tradesman could be expected to waste his time on) has been handled with the necessary deftness, all other business — saving deposits, sanitation, liaison with community councils, comfort bags for the troops — is dealt with easily. Otaki summons his wife. She comes in with a steaming earthenware pot of fat white udon noodles. The sister brings in the sake. They drink to the anniversary of the Empire, to the health of the imperial family, to the army, to the navy, to the homeland. They tilt back their heads and sing the neighbourhood association song (‘A sharp tap, tap from the neighbourhood asso-ci-ation! When I opened the lattice gate, there was a fa-mi-liar face!’) The photographer begins a story about a young couple he photographed the previous week in Shitaya, but no one, it seems, can understand whether the story is intended to be sentimental or lewd.

Father begins to push himself up from the mat. ‘If you will excuse me . .’

‘Before we finish,’ says Saburo, ‘let me thank you again for your confidence in me.’

‘Not at all,’ says Otaki. ‘It’s we who must be grateful.’

‘I am a soldier,’ says Saburo. ‘I think like a soldier.’

‘That’s exactly it,’ says Itaki.

‘Soldiers don’t put off what needs to be done,’ continues Saburo. ‘They do it straight away.’

‘Like photographers!’ cries the photographer, his face blazing from the drink.

‘So I have made a rota . .’

‘A rota?’ asks Otaki, quietly.

‘For fire-watching,’ says Saburo. ‘Other rotas will follow. I will post them on the gate of my house. Everyone will make it his duty to read them at least once a day. There can be no excuses.’ He pauses to put on his cap, to carefully adjust it. ‘The honour of taking the first watch I have awarded to the Takano family. It is now nine twenty. Deployment will commence at nine forty-five.’ He uses the wall to gain his footing, takes the crutch and leaves with the old woman. The door slides shut. The chimes jangle. The men keep their eyes lowered. Otaki bares his teeth at the table, makes a kind of sucking noise. After a few moments his sister, very discreetly, begins collecting the dishes.

At nine fifty Yuji is in his greatcoat on the drying platform, a woollen muffler wrapped over his skull and knotted beneath his chin. On his right sleeve he wears the armband Saburo gave him at nine forty-five, a white band on which Kyoko or the old woman has embroidered the character for fire. He has also been issued with a wooden rattle and a whistle on a length of string. At ten o’clock Miyo brings him tea, then he is alone again. Father will relieve him at two o’clock but two o’clock is a long way off. He sniffs, dabs at his nose, punches some warmth into his arms. One by one, with a soft metallic sound, the big orange leaves of the gingko tree are falling. He starts to pace, then stops and creeps to the platform parapet. Something is moving down there. One of the cats? He leans over, squints. A torch beam bursts against his face.

‘Don’t let me catch you sleeping,’ hisses Saburo, a voice without a body. ‘Don’t ever let me catch you sleeping!’

The light clicks off. For half a minute Yuji is blind, then the night patiently reassembles itself. The tree, the far-off flickering of ‘Jintan Pills’, the undulating roofs, the decorative rake of searchlights above the palace. And finally, untellable at first from the fragments of beam at the backs of his eyes, the stars in their vast garrisons, glistening in the brittle air.

2

In the heart of the Low City, a man is lying under the front of a blue van. Only his legs are visible, two stout legs and a pair of feet in split-toed canvas boots. A small crowd has gathered, the sort who will stop to watch two birds fighting over a worm. Yuji, raw-eyed after three shifts on the platform in the eight nights since the meeting at Otaki’s, is kneeling at the side of the boots trying to decide whether he should mention the policeman who, at a policeman’s leisurely pace, is making his way past the line of traffic behind the van. What do they have in the back today? Radio valves, two or three sacks of charcoal, some light bulbs, a case or two of Korean brandy . . How interested would a policeman be in such things?

The legs are stirring. ‘Give me a pull!’

Yuji grips the canvas heels, leans back his weight. A stocky, moon-faced, middle-aged man appears, Grandfather’s neighbour, Mr Fujitomi.

‘Try her now.’

In the cab, the ignition is a button on the floor. The first time Yuji tries it the engine rasps, sputters, dies. He tries again. This time it fires.

‘Tough as tanks,’ says Fujitomi, jumping up beside Yuji and using a sheet of newspaper to wipe the oil from his hands. ‘You could drive one of these all the way to Moscow.’ He swings shut the door. The policeman’s face floats in the wing mirror. Fujitomi frowns. ‘Let’s go,’ he says. ‘The river. Nice and gently.’

After Grandfather’s illness, that event in the middle of the night that had left him for a few hours paralysed and barely able to call for help (‘It was,’ said Sonoko, ‘like the cawing of a bird’), Mr Fujitomi had made several neighbourly visits, each time bringing with him some little luxury — a half-dozen Californian lemons, a parcel of good tea or, on one occasion, a box of pharmaceuticals that Grandfather’s doctor had assured them were no longer available — and on each visit he sat for an hour by Grandfather’s head to listen, carefully, to the unintelligible sounds he made. On the third or fourth of these visits he found Yuji in the vegetable garden, prodding tentatively at the dry earth with one of Grandfather’s hoes. He had laughed at him, told him the garden would take care of itself until the spring then — after a pause in which he seemed to study Yuji carefully, to weigh him up — added that his son, Tamotsu, had received his red paper a month ago and was now with the Thirty-fifth Regiment somewhere in central China.

‘I hope he comes back soon,’ said Yuji.

‘You’re supposed to offer your congratulations,’ replied Fujitomi, ‘but I too hope he comes home soon. Tell me something. You know how to drive?’

An hour later, on land at the back of Fujitomi’s house, Yuji was at the wheel of the blue Nissan receiving his first driving lesson. Driving, so it turned out, was quite a pleasurable activity. It was not even that difficult, as long as all he had to avoid was a few trees.

‘Tamotsu was my driver,’ explained Fujitomi. ‘And I have no other sons. Perhaps you could fill in for a while? Unless you have something better to do. There’s money, of course. You won’t be short.’

‘You want me to drive for you?’

‘Pick-ups and deliveries.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Pick-ups and deliveries. No heavy work.’

There was one more afternoon driving circuits round the cedar trees, then early the following morning, a light mist on the road, they set off for the centre of Tokyo. Somehow — and even Fujitomi’s imperturbability was tested — they survived the near-miss with the bus in Akasaka, the many near misses with angry cyclists, the terrifying moment when Yuji came within the width of a sandal from reversing into a canal in Kyobashi.

They picked up — sacks, boxes, sealed cases, crates, barrels. And they delivered — to hotels, to large houses, to the backs of businesses, to men who, looking somewhat like Mr Fujitomi, handed over grubby bundles of yen. Of these, at the end of the day, Yuji always received his share. By the first week of November, he could, had he wished it, have eaten at Kawashima’s three nights a week. He could even have afforded the Snow Goose if there had only been someone to take there. He forgot about Horikawa, about scribbling for a living. He found it amusing, though slightly disconcerting, that money could be made so simply. Pick up, deliver. Pick up, deliver. No heavy work.

At the river (the engine has cut out twice more and twice more Fujitomi has crawled between the wheels), they cross at the Ryogoku Bridge. Their next collection is in Honjo, somewhere deep among its web of wires and chimney shadow. They pass temples, slums, little chaotic factories, then pull up beside a gate in a blackened wall. Yuji sounds the horn.

‘Got a new boy?’ asks the man who unlocks the gate.

‘Helping while Tamotsu’s across the water.’

‘The Thirty-fifth, isn’t it?’ asks the man. ‘Not a bad outfit. Long as he keeps his head down.’

Under his coat — a civilian coat of black and white twill — the man is in puttees, breeches, a tunic with five brass buttons down the front. So too are the men who load the van. It’s not the first time in his new work that Yuji has seen this, and though Mr Fujitomi has offered no explanation, none, perhaps, is required. Rice, fuel, tobacco — even items like paper and soap — the army has them in abundance. All over the city there are depots, all over the country, soon, perhaps, all over Asia, each barracks, each camp, a new outlet, a fresh business. Is this what war is about? Not abstract concerns like racial destiny but the making of more and more money? A yen block to counter the dollar block, the sterling block? It is a view of things Yuji is not accustomed to, not yet. The soldiers, Mr Fujitomi, the likeable, practical men they meet in yards who snap open crates with a crowbar, who drag tarpaulins, who do impressive sums in their heads, seem part of a different system, a kind of parallel circuitry that has no more to do with sacrificial battles than it does, say, with poetry.

The last job (a customer for the Korean brandy) is finished an hour after dark. Half an hour later Yuji drops down from the Nissan outside Grandfather’s gate. ‘Give the old fellow my regards,’ says Fujitomi, sliding across to the driver’s seat. ‘You’re staying the night?’

‘I have duties at home,’ says Yuji.

‘More of this fire-watching nonsense? Someone needs to sort that crank out.’ He pulls the day’s takings from the pocket of his coat, peels off the outermost note, passes it through the window. Yuji reaches up, takes the note between his fingers. There is something about the feel of this kind of money, money that does a job, that keeps itself busy. Some of the notes are worn soft as antique cotton. Crushed in the hand, they do not crease.

‘Until tomorrow, then!’

‘Until tomorrow.’

Grandfather is in the eight-mat room, a buttressing of small cushions around his hips, a slate-coloured blanket over his shoulders. Sonoko is beside him, holding a bowl of tea, or something medicinal perhaps. On the other side of the brazier, Father, looking both bored and anxious, is smoking a cigarette. When Yuji comes in, Grandfather says something, then says it again.

‘Yes,’ says Yuji, hoping he has made sense of those knotted sounds. ‘It was good business today.’

Grandfather nods, smiles a lopsided smile.

Sonoko shuffles to the brazier, busies herself with the kettle.

‘There’s a train at quarter past,’ says Father, dropping the end of his cigarette onto the coals. ‘If we want to catch it, we should leave soon.’ He sits up, kneels formally. ‘Will you be all right?’ he asks the old man. ‘One us could probably stay if you wished it. And please remember the doctor will be here at nine tomorrow. He will want to take some blood. And please, give some consideration to my suggestion. The garden room in Hongo could be made most comfortable. It goes without saying that Sonoko would be welcome to accompany you.’

Grandfather is waving an arm, angrily. He is saying something angrily. Father blinks at him, confused for a moment. ‘Noriko . .? Yes. Please do not concern yourself. I will take care of Noriko.’

‘You want to do the first shift tonight?’ asks Yuji as they follow the path through the garden.

‘It would be better for you to have it,’ says Father. ‘And I’ll come an hour earlier. Your rest is more necessary than mine.’

‘I wouldn’t say so.’

‘Of course it is.’

‘I’m only the driver.’

‘Driving requires concentration.’

‘I quite enjoy it.’

‘You’ll get to know the city.’

‘Yes.’

‘Fujitomi seems a decent sort. Though it may be he sails a little close to the wind . .’

‘It’s just pick-ups, deliveries . .’

They are passing the old rickshaw. In the dark under the tree it is almost invisible, the faintest gleam from the painted wheels.

‘You think the story about the actor is true?’ asks Yuji.

‘What? Dragging him all the way to Kyoto? I used to think it wasn’t. Now, well . . perhaps he did it after all.’

‘Yes, I think so too.’

‘By the way,’ says Father, ‘before you came, he was trying to say something about building a rickshaw. And something about the Bank of Japan? I had no idea, but Sonoko seemed to think you would know what it was about.’

3

One Sunday every month, for as long as Yuji can remember, he and Father have sat in their nightrobes at the table in the Western room to eat a Western breakfast. Rice, fish, natto and green tea are exchanged for bread rolls and coffee, kasutera cakes, smoked ham, cheese cut from large, waxy blocks. Almost all of it was bought from the German delicatessen on the Ginza. Now, without any discussion between them, they have stopped going there. Was it the fall of France? The bombing of the English cities? The rumours (they are barely more than that, little muffled stories carried in the remnants of the liberal press) of what, under the smoke of war, might be happening to the European Jews? So they have lost the peppercorn salami, the Jarlsberg, the paper-thin slices of Black Forest ham. Even the last of the coffee, Lohmeyer’s house blend, black as loam, has been abandoned, and today they are drinking another coffee, a lesser coffee, taken from a case with army markings in the back of the blue Nissan. There is no cause to complain, however. Having coffee at all makes them more fortunate than most, and kasutera cakes are still only ten sen a piece, sometimes less.

On the table, yesterday’s newspaper lies open at a photograph, something quite artistic, of a soldier in silhouette, his arm flung back in readiness to hurl a grenade at the unseen enemy. Looking at it, Yuji thinks of Fumi Kihara and the giant match (‘Do you need that more than he does?’). Father is reading the journal of the Japanese Archaeological Society (‘Techniques for the Dating of Cultural Artefacts in Pre-Kofun-era Sites’). From somewhere in the garden, somewhere among the neatly etched shadows, comes the agitated twittering of sparrows.

‘I wonder what it will be?’ says Miyo, arriving from the street, her cheeks bright with cold.

‘What what will be?’ asks Yuji.

‘The reason,’ she says.

‘The reason?’

‘For going,’ she says. ‘The reason for going.’

Father lowers the journal, takes the cigarette from his mouth, and looks at her over the top of his glasses. ‘What are you talking about?’ he asks.

‘The notice,’ she says.

‘On the Kitamuras’ gate?’ asks Father.

She nods.

‘A new one?’

She nods.

‘What does it say?’

‘You have to go there at noon.’

‘Today? Yuji, you better have a look.’

It’s ten forty-five. Yuji finishes his coffee, dresses. The notice — this one in red ink — employs the same semi-official language as the others, and commands all members of the neighbourhood association and the women’s defence group, to report to the block captain’s house at twelve o’clock, Sunday, for a demonstration.

‘Even soldiers get Sunday off,’ mutters Itaki, reading the notice over Yuji’s shoulder. ‘At this rate we might as well all volunteer. Oh, by the way, Mrs Otaki says you can get sugar . .’

‘I’ll ask,’ says Yuji.

‘And flour?’

‘I’ll ask.’

‘We should have made you block captain,’ says Itaki, turning back towards his shop. ‘I said it all along.’

Promptly at noon they file into the Kitamura house, fifteen men and women, shuffling along the corridor of beaten earth behind Grandma Kitamura. Because the nature of the demonstration has remained a mystery, some of the neighbours are dressed formally as if for a visit to a government office, while others have put on overalls, boots, headscarves. They pass through the house and out into the garden. In the pond, under the dirty gold of its surface, Yuji glimpses the mottled back of a carp. Saburo and Kyoko are waiting at the bottom of the garden. Kyoko is wearing a pair of monpe trousers. They are not as elegant as those worn by the model in the newspaper. They make her legs look shorter, her hips broader.

Saburo is in a white military work tunic. He has a pickaxe over his shoulder. He starts shouting at them while they are still some distance off. He tells them they are on the front-line now, that they must develop the Yamamoto spirit, that the enemy could arrive at any time, right here, in Tokyo. ‘That sky,’ he bawls, pointing, ‘could turn black with enemy planes. We have to get ready for that! We have to get ready today!’ He glares at them, sucks in a deep breath, steadies himself, throws down his crutch and raises the pickaxe. After a dozen swings he looks round at Kyoko. ‘What are you waiting for?’

She starts to dig, tipping out with her shovel the ground he has broken. ‘You, too, Granny,’ says Saburo, roping together the two halves of an entrenching tool.

The neighbours neither move nor speak. The digging is very slow. After half an hour Mr Kawabata has to sit. An hour passes. The sweat drips from Saburo’s nose. He swings and falls, gets up and swings again. Kyoko, in her baggy trousers, shovels dully, competently, as if through a dung heap on her father’s farm. After two hours they stop. The old woman’s face is violently flushed.

Saburo addresses them again. ‘Trenches! Every household! Trenches to shelter in! Takano family, you have the biggest garden. You will set an example by digging the biggest trench. The deepest. Now go home. And remember, if you don’t want to roast, you better dig!’

Yuji helps Mr Kawabata to stand. Mrs Kawabata, wearing her women’s defence sash, is quietly weeping. ‘We’ll just have to roast,’ she says, once they have reached the safety of the street. ‘Old people like us won’t have a chance anyway. Excuse me,’ she says, ‘for saying something improper, but I hope it happens soon. After all, it’s not much to look forward to, is it?’

The neighbours, avoiding each other’s eyes, turn away to their houses.

Up in the sewing room, mid-afternoon, a woollen jacket over his knees, Yuji is allowing himself to drift towards sleep. Now he has the fire-watching, the days in the blue van, sleep is something he would like to store up, to have a reserve of to set against a future scarcity, for it seems inevitable now that he and everyone else is entering a time when they will peer at the world through the smoke-glass of an inassuagable fatigue. He lets the book (Les Fleurs du Mal) slide from his grip, lets his chin drop towards his chest, sighs, and sees, in the lasts instants of consciousness — the first, perhaps, of dreaming — a sun-cleaned image of Kyoko shovelling the earth in her garden, while the young cat, the absurdly named Foreign Girl, limps over the grass towards him.

When he wakes, coming to suddenly in the twilit room with no sense of how long he has slept, he feels oddly calm, sober and calm, as if, in sleep, some old difficulty has found an unexpected resolution, though what difficulty, what resolution, he cannot tell himself. He is stretched there, willing the moment to go on a little longer, when he hears noises from outside, from the garden, and turns his head sharply towards the platform door. He listens for a second, then scrambles to his feet, opens the door, and goes onto the platform. Saburo is leaning over the fence (what is he standing on?). He is leaning over the fence and shouting at Father.

‘You think I should come over and dig it for you? Are you afraid to get a blister on your hands? This is a final warning! If the trench is not started before nightfall . .’

And father says something back, a low voice, a slow voice. Whatever it is he says it leaves Saburo speechless.

Yuji hurries down the stairs, slips at the turn, bounces down the last few steps, almost knocks over Miyo. He meets Father at the door of the Western room. ‘Please excuse me,’ he says. ‘I ought to have started it. I will start immediately.’

He goes into the kitchen. Haruyo is steaming tofu for Mother’s evening meal. The look he gives her, loaded with rage, visibly unsettles her. He takes the lean-to key from its peg beside the door and goes out to the narrow path (the tradesmen’s path) that runs between the kitchen and the spindle hedge. He unlocks the lean-to. The air in there still tastes of summer, preserved somehow around the blades of tools, in the heat-warped wood of cobwebbed shelves. He chooses a mattock and walks through the garden holding it across his hips like a rifle. He should ask for Father’s advice, of course, for his instructions, but he starts to dig near the old pine stump, hacking at the ground until, after ten minutes, the muscles in his back begin to spasm. He crouches, brow against the mattock’s haft, cools off, then starts again, a slower, less angry rhythm that stops only when he can no longer clearly see his feet. If he is going to continue, he will need some light, and he is crossing the garden to fetch a lantern when Father summons him from the open door of the garden study. They go inside together.

‘I was just fetching a lantern,’ says Yuji.

‘Listen to me,’ says Father. He pauses. ‘I have phoned Kensuke. I have told him of our situation. I have told him I am no longer certain of my ability to protect your mother. Her tranquillity.’

‘You’re going to the farm?’

‘We will take the express on Wednesday.’

‘Wednesday!’

‘Tomorrow I will go to Setagaya. I will explain things.’

‘And me?’

‘You?’

‘You wish me to remain here?’

‘For us all to leave would draw . . unnecessary attention.’

‘I see.’

‘I have an obligation to your mother.’

‘Yes.’

‘If we stayed. If something happened . .’

‘When will you return?’

‘That will depend. Not, perhaps, until after the New Year. Do you need money?’

‘No.’

‘It may be easier for you when we have gone. I regret that we have not been able to help you more.’

‘I have been a burden to you . .’ says Yuji, mechanically.

‘You seem to be managing well enough these days.’

‘With Mr Fujitomi?’

‘You may end up a man of business, like your grandfather.’

‘It seems unlikely.’

‘Yes. Perhaps.’

‘It’s a long time since Mother travelled,’ says Yuji.

‘Yes,’ says Father. ‘Quite a long time.’

The window is a narrow rectangle a degree or so less utterly dark than the book-lined blackness of the study. Father has almost disappeared, can be seen only peripherally, as certain remote objects in the night sky are seen, by not looking at them directly. Again, they have come to the edge of a conversation, that long-postponed confessing that would begin — and either could begin it — with the words ‘After Ryuichi . .’. It might have freed them once (these two who have taken a certain pride in not speaking), but now, it seems, the time for it has passed. They have changed. They have been changed. Between them, the tilt of circumstance is quite different.

In the room the air is peppery against the lining of Yuji’s nose. He sniffs, dabs his nostrils with a finger. ‘The Wednesday express?’ he asks. For all he can see of Father, he might as well be speaking to himself.

4

Yuji is in the first car with Mother and Father. Haruyo and Miyo and most of the luggage are in the car behind. As the cars arrived late (held up by some parade in Iidabashi) and loading them took longer than expected, Father is fidgeting with the shirt cuff above his watch and scowling at the back of the driver’s head.

Yuji cannot take his eyes from Mother. How strange, how extraordinary to see her with the common light of day washing over her face! She smiles at him, but when the movement of the car jolts them in their seats she shuts her eyes as if in pain. She ought, thinks Yuji, to travel in a palanquin, or like an heirloom doll, wrapped in tissue paper inside a cedar box. How will she manage the train? And then another hour of driving, the twisting ascent to the farm on roads that at each sharp turn become rougher and narrower, more track than road? He is afraid for her, but feels too a flickering excitement, as though they were all setting off on a family outing, a trip to view the chrysanthemums at Dangozaka, a restaurant by the river. Even to the kabuki . .

At the station, two elderly porters help them with the luggage, leading the way, puffing and calling briskly for room. The Kyoto train has almost finished boarding. At the windows, little parties, or single men or women are readying themselves for the awkward moment of farewell. The porters carry the cases inside. Father and Haruyo follow them up the steps. On the platform, Yuji and Miyo wait with Mother. Miyo is shaking with sobs. Mother murmurs to her, their heads close together, but the girl can neither look up nor reply.

Father climbs down from the train. ‘There’s not much time,’ he says.

Mother takes his arm. She turns to Yuji. ‘I will be thinking of you,’ she says.

He nods. ‘I will be thinking of you also.’

They look at each other, the ghost and her son, as if they were alone together. He hopes she cannot see the fear that has taken hold of him, the wild certainty that once she has stepped onto the train he will never see her again, that she will die (fade to nothing), or he will die (in some shell-hole in China). Father and Haruyo help her up the steps, almost carrying her. As soon as she is inside, the porters jump down and swing the door shut. A ragged ball of smoke rolls down the carriage roofs. A minute later the whole train shudders, rocks backwards, and begins, with the appearance of immense effort, to creep along the platform. Father struggles with the compartment window, forces it open. ‘I will inform you of our arrival,’ he says. Is that what he says? He can hardly be heard, hardly, in the sudden flow of steam, be seen. Yuji waves to him, then, in a gesture stolen from the cinema screen — Hotel du Nord? The Citadel? — he lifts his peach-bloom trilby from his head and holds it high until the last carriage is lost in the sunlight of midday and there are only the shining rails, narrowing and curving into the distance.

At the house, Miyo follows him like Asako’s daughter. She looks at him with anxious, childish glances, while all around them the empty rooms give off some low electric hum of absence. They go from room to room. Surely, if they are patient, if they listen hard enough, they will hear a voice, the scrape of a wooden sole on the verandah.

He opens the doors to Mother’s room. Everything in there — the sitting cushions, the red lacquer table in the alcove, the folding screen with its birds and willows, the not-quite-cold brazier — seems subtly unfamiliar, as though two hours’ abandonment has remade them into not-quite-perfect replicas of themselves. From habit he looks for his brother, but the photograph and the cross have gone, leaving only their shadows on the sand-coloured wall.

He walks out of the room, slides shut the screens. He will not go in there again. He tells Miyo to put on warm clothes, clothes she can work in, then goes upstairs and changes into a pair of old trousers, an old pullover. She is waiting for him by the bottom of the stairs. He looks at her, manages a smile, and wonders what will become of her, how well she will survive these coming times. If his red paper arrives — and who is to say it will not come tonight? — she cannot remain in the house on her own. Would she want to go to Kyoto? Or back to her family in the north, the poverty of a home she has not seen in five years? If she wanted to stay in Tokyo, perhaps he could arrange something at the telephone exchange. The young girls there live together in dormitories. She would make friends. Be safe? Safe at least from Block Captain Kitamura.

He collects the tools from the lean-to and leads her down to the pine stump. They work, one behind the other, digging as if the sky might indeed, at any moment, grow dark with enemy planes. By dusk, their faces streaked with black sweat, they are stood to their thighs in a crooked mouth of raw soil. Yuji clambers out, reaches down a hand to Miyo. They sit on the ground, panting, feeling the cold steal into them as their sweat evaporates. She starts to cry again. He does not know what to say. He waits, fingering the blisters on his palms, until her sobs are quieter. ‘Are you hungry?’ he asks. She nods, wipes her nose on her wrist. They leave the tools in the trench, walk slowly through the garden to the unlit house.

5

The professor’s absence is quickly noted, becomes for a week the favourite subject of local gossip, particularly the fact that his wife, an invalid, a woman barely seen in years, has gone with him, along with that frightening maid of hers. To veiled enquiries Yuji makes veiled replies. To Saburo’s veiled taunts he says nothing.

The season’s cold intensifies. He begins to dread the nights on the platform. There is no one now to relieve him at two a.m, no mumbled exchange before sinking down into a dreamless sleep. Miyo would take a turn if he asked her to but he cannot (those thin arms, thin legs) find it proper to make such a request. So the nights are his own, an interminable bridge of hours, of tedium, of cold.

For his duty, this first week in December, he has put on so many layers of clothing his moon-thrown shadow on the outside wall of Father’s room is large as a bear’s. He does not know what the time is — to look at his watch would mean exposing a strip of skin to the air — but he knows (his growing familiarity with stars, with grades of darkness) there are at least four or five hours before the first streaks of the dawn. Too tired even to yawn, he leans against one of the drying posts, listens to the calling of owls, and lets his gaze carry him over roofs and ghostly radio aerials to where the red eye of ‘Jintan Pills’ blinks on, blinks off, blinks on, blinks off. Why, tonight, does the sign bring such odd associations with it? Lilacs, light on silver cutlery, an arm swathed in white and yellow stripes.

He peers into the Kitamura garden, his eyes picking between the shadows, then goes on stiff legs to his room and starts, with only moonlight to help him, to search for the jacket he last wore that day of high summer in the Azabu Hills. He finds it between two others, hanging from the beading, then finds, in the left-hand pocket, the half-dozen little pills Dick Amazawa dropped there. He puts one on his tongue, hesitates, then adds another. All he has to wash them down with is a mouthful of the Korean brandy he keeps in a corner of the platform to stave off the worst of the cold. He drinks, swallows, shudders, resumes his watch.

After fifteen minutes the blood directly under the surface of his skin begins to simmer. Ten minutes after that he is grinding his teeth and shuffling restlessly across the slats of the platform deck. Should he have taken just one of the pills? A half? Too late now. If he has poisoned himself, then this is how he will end, a heap of clothes in which a man is hidden, his face to the stars. He rocks on the balls of his feet, observes, with some fascination, the mist of his own breath as it trails past his cheek. The night is ticking like a clock. The moon gives off a hiss of distant burning. The desire to lie down, to sleep, has been replaced by an equally urgent desire to explain himself to someone, to justify, to lay out his life in a great flood of words . . Should he wake Miyo? Is it time for another pill? One more pill and his body might be shocked into poetry! He might even understand what Amazawa wants for the Unit, what Ishihara’s vision of the future is. Death as a religion? Violent death?

He is standing there, tense with the effort of keeping up with his own thoughts, when the noise, the racket at the edge of hearing he has been hoping would simply fade away, becomes, instead, more insistent. Wooden clappers. A drum. He listens, strains to hear, hears, understands, but cannot quite believe it. He is fire-watching and somewhere — or so the noises tell him — there is a fire. A real fire! He scans the 150 degrees of his view from the platform. Nothing there, nothing at all. What is the procedure now? What is he supposed to do? Call Saburo? Use his whistle? He has not, he realises, paid much attention to the scant instructions he has received, nor has he read the recently issued government manual — other than to glance at the title (Stay and Fight!) — a copy of which is under a pile of newspapers on the dresser downstairs.

He goes into the sewing room again, fills his arms with books, and carries them outside. At the back of the platform, the roof slopes to chest height. He builds a step out of dictionaries and novels and clambers up. He has never been on the roof before. The tiles grate and shift beneath his weight. He starts to climb (not a bear any more but a giant slug), writhing over the tiles, the bird droppings, the tufts of grass, the glittering moss, until his gloved hands grasp the ridge and he pulls himself up the final inches. He sees the fire immediately — a small cloud of pulsing orange light somewhere up by Watanabe’s bathhouse — and in his excitement he lets go of the ridge and descends chaotically, losing three buttons from his coat and landing on the platform, winded but unhurt, on the cushion of his own back. He gropes around his neck for the whistle, lets off three short blasts, drops the whistle, and runs through the house.

‘Fire by Watanabe’s,’ he says to Miyo as he pulls on a pair of boots.

‘Fire by Watanabe’s!’ he calls to Saburo, who swings from his gate, bellowing orders. He commands Yuji to stop, Yuji cannot, the little pills will not let him. He mounts his bicycle. His legs seem immensely happy to be peddling. He weaves, stylishly, around all obstacles. ‘Fire by Watanabe’s bathhouse!’ he calls to whoever he passes.

After ten minutes he smells it, a waft of smoke, sour, fungal. He slows. The way now is filling up with drowsy neighbours, bedrobes under winter coats. They wander about, leaderless. He leaves the bicycle against the shuttered window of a shop, and runs, part of a pack of running shadows, the length of a last street.

Already, at least a hundred people have gathered by the building, though the noise of them is buried under the rushing and crackle of the fire. Such is the confusion, the rapid shifting of light and dark, it takes Yuji several moments, standing on tiptoe and craning his neck, to realise that the fire is not by Watanabe’s, it is Watanabe’s. He lets out a sound, a moan of surprise and sorrow. ‘Did they escape?’ he shouts to the woman next to him. She doesn’t hear him, or doesn’t know. From a shattered window a flame shoots out, dies back, then leans from the window beside it, a lunatic in a yellow bed sheet.

Someone passes him a bucket. He passes it on, slopping water over his boots. Someone else sees his armband, the character for fire. The crowd opens a channel, lets him through, pushes him forward. Soon, he is close enough to feel the heat prickling the skin of his face. In the distance he can hear the swelling chant of a fire crew, then a group of men jog past, not firemen but soldiers, cloths tied round their faces. Immediately, unthinkingly, Yuji follows them, runs after them like a boy in a game. They go into the alley at the side of the bathhouse — the side that seeps smoke rather than flames — and climb a flight of rusted metal steps to a door at the level of the first floor. The door is locked. The soldier at the front bursts it open with his boot. On the other side, Mrs Watanabe is sprawled on the mat, her small white feet twitching. Two of the soldiers lift her and retreat towards the alley. The others, Yuji at the rear, start, on hands and knees, to go up the stairs. The smoke above their heads is black, clotted. The stairs are hot to the touch, even through gloves. On one of the steps a hole the size of a horse’s eye has burnt away (or was it always there? A peephole?) and Yuji has a fire-lit glimpse of the women’s baths below, the water crusted with ash.

At the entrance to the upper room the curtain is fringed with small flames. They duck beneath it, blunder on, crawl as far as the passage to the kitchen but can go no further. A single searing glance through narrowed eyes is enough to show that this is where it started, that old Watanabe, whatever is left of him, will be sifted from among the cinders of his rattan chair.

‘Watch out!’

At the back of the kitchen something ignites, explodes with a shriek, burns with a bright green flame. Frightened now, awake at last to the danger, this peril he has so casually put himself in the path of, Yuji gets to his feet, intending, with held breath, to run for the top of the stairs, but as he turns he trips across the end of a table, scattering the tiles of a last mah-jong game. For a moment he is stunned, and when he raises his head he can no longer see the others. He calls out, drags his aching chest over the mats. The room, familiar to him from countless visits, has become a puzzle, a maze. Is this where it ends? Not in a shell-hole, but a bathhouse a mile from his home? He circles, squints crazily into the confused air, the flame-dark, then sees, an arm’s-reach to the side of him, a smudge of khaki. He stretches for it, touches cloth, flesh. A smoke-blackened face looms towards his own. Two eyes widen, blink. Stare. Yuji stares back, the pair of them, for a long second neither can afford, frozen in mutual amazement. Then the face looks away, and together, burrowing under the smoke, they find the top of the stairs. The house is roaring like a sea. They slither down, side by side, coughing and retching. Odd events take place in Yuji’s brain, leisurely imaginings, sequences, serenely lit, from boyhood (there, at the edge of the sea, is his brother gathering clams in a bucket, there is Grandfather standing in the low tide, his yukata gathered about his thighs. .)

Against his cheek he feels a gust of air. Cold air. A voice shouts, ‘One more here!’ His shoulders are seized. A man, a fireman, a wonderful stranger, lifts him to his feet. Then more hands, more strong arms, an effortless progress through the crowd until he is set down, gently, on the far pavement, his back against a wall. A canteen of water is pushed towards him. He drinks, coughs furiously, splashes water into his eyes. His coat is buttonless now. Patches of it are smouldering. He grips his throbbing head, spits between his knees. It’s several minutes before he feels well enough to look at the soldier beside him. A minute more before he has the wind to speak.

‘It’s you?’ he asks. ‘It’s really you?’ His voice is half an octave deeper. To his own ears he sounds like Father. ‘I can’t . . It’s so . .’ He drinks from the canteen again but coughs as he swallows and spews up the water. ‘Poor Watanabe,’ he says, at last. ‘Think Mrs Watanabe made it?’

Junzo is wiping his face with the cloth that masked his mouth and nose. When he has finished he climbs to his feet, tugs a field cap from his belt and puts it on a scalp shaved so close it’s hard to see any hair there at all.

‘I wrote to you,’ says Yuji, rising dizzily with the help of the wall. ‘I even tried to visit. When you were in Kagurazaka . . Did the girl tell you?’

Junzo is walking away. From behind he looks like a drunk pretending, very hard, to be sober. Yuji hobbles after him. The movement of one of his knees is sharply painful. He tugs at Junzo’s elbow. ‘What?’ he asks. ‘What?’

Junzo shakes him off. Yuji grabs at him again, is shaken off a second time. The third time Junzo swings round. The punch is not hard and the aim is clumsy but it sends them both sprawling onto the pavement. Breathless, awkward as a pair of deep-sea divers, they wrestle feebly by the heels of the crowd.

‘Have you . . . lost . . . your mind?’ gasps Yuji, pinned under the other’s weight.

‘Keep away from me,’ hisses Junzo. ‘Stay away from me!’

‘What are you talking about? What—’

The crowd lets out a roar of excitement, surges back, breaks like surf over the pavement. The bathhouse roof is giving way. The flames roil up, unfurl themselves triumphantly. There’s a noise like a volley of rifles, then the main beam, burnt through, sunders at its mid-point and flies into the house, sending up two swirling plumes of sparks. Almost at once the fire is calmer. The crowd advances. Yuji looks for Junzo, summons the breath to call his name, then sees him, his back, already half a street away. He sets off after him, walking as quickly as his damaged knee will allow. By the time he is close enough to speak they have left the fire and the crowd behind them.

‘What is it? What have I done?’

Junzo neither slows nor answers. Yuji knows he will not be able to keep up much longer, that he will, in another eight or ten strides, fall behind and lose him. Whatever he is going to do he must do it now. He moves closer, and with a surge of force, an acceleration made up in equal parts of fear and anger and the feverish chemistry of Amazawa’s pills, he hooks an arm round Junzo’s neck and drops them both into the dust. It’s a schoolboy throw, a schoolboy trick. He clings on, Junzo’s throat in the crook of his elbow. In the playground, this is when the captured boy submits, becomes, in defeat, sullenly amenable, but Junzo, writhing one way then the other, is already managing to loosen Yuji’s grip. He frees himself and with eyes tight shut strikes out at Yuji’s padded body until a bout of coughing doubles him up and the fight is over. Yuji stands — this long night of falling and standing — dusts down his ruined coat, then leans and silently offers the wheezing Junzo his assistance. His hand is pushed away, though not with any vehemence.

‘I saw you,’ says Junzo, when he too is on his feet again.

‘Saw me?’

‘I saw you come out of the Snow Goose. I saw you get into the taxi.’ His voice is toneless. A voice for reporting facts one is weary of living with. ‘I saw you both.’

‘Saw?’

‘I was outside the billiard parlour.’

‘We’d been . . to the kabuki.’

‘You left the house at dawn.’

‘You saw me then?’

‘A neighbour. The woman from the fan shop. Told Hanako.’

‘And Hanako told you?’

A nod.

‘Why would she tell you that?’

‘Because I asked her.’

‘When?’

‘What does it matter? I already knew it all by then.’

‘Knew?’

‘That you had abandoned her.’

‘Alissa?’

‘If you had cared for her, if you had stayed at her side, I could have accepted it . . her choosing you. I would have found a way of accepting it. I would even have tried to be happy for you. But you abandoned her. So I started hating you.’

‘This is insanity,’ says Yuji, a protest that comes out sounding like a question. He is beginning to flounder. Something is happening to him. He is being swept away. Everything is being swept away . . ‘Is she sick?’ he asks, suddenly. ‘I met her dance teacher in Asakusa. Mrs Yamaguchi. She said she’d had a letter.’

Junzo laughs. The laugh becomes a cough. He spits, swipes the drool from his lips. ‘Sick? I don’t think it’s usually called a sickness. Can you really be as stupid as you sound?’

In the upstairs room of the house to the side of them, a light comes on. A shadow moves the other side of glass and paper. The seconds pass. The light goes off.

‘She wanted to show me a picture,’ whispers Yuji. ‘She was explaining something.’

‘You abandoned her.’

‘She was trying to tell me . . who she was.’

‘And you abandoned her.’

‘Please. Wait. You know where she is?’

A headshake.

‘And Hanako?’

‘No.’

‘Who then?’

‘Who?’ Junzo’s face lights up with a smile of utter misery. ‘Who do you think?’ He shivers. He has no coat, only his khaki tunic. ‘You’ve always been blind,’ he mutters, starting to shuffle away. There is no question of Yuji following him this time. He tries to remember where he left his bicycle. He remembers the pleasure of riding it. It seems to have been months ago.

‘If you had said,’ he calls, his voice loud as a dog’s bark in the hush of the street, ‘If you had said you loved her . .’ And though he cannot be certain at such a distance, cannot be sure through his bloodshot eyes, it seems that his friend, nearing the unlit corner, falters in his stride and stumbles against nothing.

6

He wakes with a taste of ash in his mouth, smoke and ash. Slowly, reluctantly, he opens his eyes to the light on the ceiling, then turns to where Miyo is kneeling beside him, a piece of sewing in her hands (the same piece she has pretended to be working at ever since Mother and Father left for Kyoto). When she sees him looking at her, she smiles excitedly.

‘You’re like a hero,’ she says. ‘Everyone knows about it. Even Mr Kitamura must be impressed!’

‘Kitamura . .’ mumbles Yuji, then shuts his eyes again. He has aches, mysterious zones of pain, but no fever. He is not even particularly tired.

‘The doctor is coming,’ she whispers, leaning over him so close he can feel her breath on his face. ‘The honourable doctor . .’ And immediately, as though he has been listening outside the door, waiting for his cue, Kushida appears. Glasses, moustache, leather bag. Large pale hands.

‘So how is the young master of the house?’ he asks, standing above the bed, the padded shoulders of his civil defence jacket outlined by the light coming through the platform door. ‘It turns out you are the type who quite unexpectedly shows initiative. Even a sort of courage.’

‘Do you know about the old woman?’ asks Yuji. ‘The bathhouse-keeper’s wife?’

Kushida makes a movement, a small gesture involving eyes, fingertips. A gesture to signal indifference. ‘I don’t believe,’ he says, ‘we should keep you away from the army much longer, do you? You should be storming an enemy machine-gun post rather than the local bathhouse. The public baths, by the way, are not at all hygienic. A tremendous source of contagion. If every bathhouse in the city burnt down we would be much the healthier for it.’

He bandages Yuji’s swollen knee, dresses the burns on his left wrist, his left ear. ‘Should I send the bill to your father? When can we expect to see the professor again?’

‘You can send it to me,’ says Yuji, sitting, then easing himself up from the mattress. ‘Or if you prefer it I can pay you now. If you could wait downstairs? Miyo will bring you some tea.’

For the remainder of the day, of daylight, Yuji stays inside the house. When he moves he leans on a stick, a curious varnished black ornamental walking stick Father brought back from his tour of Europe and which for years — all the years of Yuji’s life — has stood among the umbrellas in the pot in the vestibule. He has attacks of coughing, spits black phlegm, blows black mucus from his nose. How has he survived it all? What does his body want of him? He puts on the radio but after an hour could not have told anyone what he has been listening to. Saburo calls. Yuji has already instructed Miyo to say he is too unwell to receive visitors. He drinks a cup of sake but finds, to his disappointment, he has no appetite for a second. At six o’clock he sends Miyo to Otaki’s for noodles. They eat. She steals glances at him, looks of wonderment. Later, he bathes, sitting in the water with his leg raised to keep the bandages dry. After the bath he starts to shake. This gives him some comfort, some hope. Now, perhaps, he is about to fall ill, to lie dangerously ill for weeks, and then, of course, a long convalescence during which the world will simply right itself. What can be expected of a man too weak to hold a cup to his lips? He goes upstairs, crawls under his quilt, prepares to descend to the familiar confusion of fever, of the blood in riot, but the shivering stops. He cannot even sleep, cannot get close to it. He gets up, dresses, limps down the stairs and tells Miyo he is going out. She stares at him as if expecting news of another fire, then squats by the vestibule step to tie his laces. He waits, stands awhile, watching from the half-open door. He can hear Itaki in conversation with someone. When the voices cease he turns up his collar, pulls down the brim of his hat, and lurches to the gate.

It takes him forty minutes to reach the tram-stop. He’s sweating. The pain in his knee has made him nauseous. On the tram he wonders if the other passengers, seeing him, his age, assume that his limp is a war wound. He gets down at the stop before the cathedral, walks under its immense shadow, then enters Feneon’s garden by the gate behind the rose bush. The moonlight that lit his view from the platform last night now lies in a tangle of bones below the bare branches of the magnolia. From the house he can see no sign of life at all. He presses his face against a window — the only one unshuttered — and sees over the salon floor a thin stain of electric yellow that comes, must surely come, from beneath the study door. He taps on the glass, taps again more loudly, keeps tapping until the light suddenly swells and a figure appears, pauses, then comes cautiously forwards. Yuji lifts off his hat, shows himself, but it is not until the Frenchman’s face is almost touching the glass on the other side that he recognises him, frowns, and points towards the kitchen door.

The moment Yuji is inside, Feneon slides home the bolts. The kitchen is several blocks of minimally variegated black. There is a smell of the food cooked earlier that evening. Grilled meat? Grilled chicken, perhaps.

They go to the study. The lamp with its green shade is the only source of light. On the big desk there are scattered sheets of writing paper, a fountain pen laid at the side of a half-written-over sheet.

‘You’ve had an accident?’ asks Feneon, leaning against a corner of the desk and looking at Yuji, at the black stick, the dressing on his ear.

‘A fall,’ says Yuji. ‘My knee. It’s not serious.’

‘Sit,’ says Feneon. He points to the armchair at the side of the desk. Yuji sits. He is not quite sure where to put the stick. In the end he holds it across the top of his thighs, gripping the wood in his fists. ‘So,’ says Feneon, ‘what’s this all about? I assume it must be important.’

Yuji nods. He has, in the few hours he has been at liberty to do so, forbidden himself to imagine the details of this moment. But now it has come he is seized by doubts. Is it possible he misunderstood what Junzo was saying? That Feneon will think he has gone mad? That the study door will open and there will be Alissa, unaltered? He plants the end of his stick on the floor, levers himself up. He has not misunderstood. The door will not open.

‘I saw Junzo last night,’ he says, addressing a cedilla of faded blue tapestry in the rug between them. ‘He informed me of . . a certain fact. It concerns your daughter.’ He lifts his gaze. There is a not quite convincing expression of gentle bemusement on Feneon’s face. ‘Her situation,’ says Yuji.

‘Her situation?’

‘Her difficult situation.’

‘I see,’ says Feneon. ‘Yes. I see.’ He rubs his knuckles softly over the burnished wood of the desk. ‘Heaven knows how Junzo learnt about it. This city is even worse than Saigon for keeping secrets. I should have known it was pointless . .’ He shrugs. ‘Though with half the world on fire and the other half about to catch, it begins to seem almost unimportant. What people think. What they know. I pity the poor child, arriving at such a moment.’

‘The child?’

‘Isn’t that what you’re talking about?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are enquiring as a friend, I suppose. Yes. It’s quite proper . . Well, let me assure you she is being well looked after. There is no need for any concern. As for her plans, what she intends to do afterwards . .’ He wafts the air. ‘She is, as I’m sure you have noticed, a rather independent young woman.’

‘I am glad she is well.’

‘Oh, yes. Physically quite well.’

‘And . . the child’s father?’

‘What about him?’

‘She has told you his name?’

For a moment it looks as if Feneon will refuse to answer his question. Then he moves his head, a sort of bridling. He shrugs again. ‘She has not,’ he says.

‘Nothing?’

‘Why? Are you thinking of challenging him? I doubt he’s the sort of man who fights duels. That would require a certain sense of honour on his part.’

‘But if he didn’t know?’

‘Know?’

‘About the child.’

‘You think that’s likely? Anyway, it’s the not-caring that matters. The not-caring one way or the other. I think we know the type of man who does that. There are names, are there not?’

‘Names,’ whispers Yuji. ‘Yes . .’

‘You better sit down,’ says Feneon, ‘before you fall down. You don’t look well at all. Shall I fetch you some water?’

‘I just wanted to say,’ says Yuji, switching now to the refuge, the audacity, of his own tongue, ‘I just wanted to say that I am the child’s father.’

‘What?’

‘The child’s father.’

‘Who? Who are you talking about?’

‘I . . Alissa . . I am the father.’

There is a long pause, then a bark of laughter. ‘You?’

They stare at each other. On Feneon’s face there is a look of utter blankness. Then the blankness is replaced by a mask of astonishment. Not for an instant, not for a single instant, has Feneon imagined anything as impossible as Yuji being what he now claims to be. That much is clear. What is also clear, what has flashed from those grey eyes so plainly, so unguardedly, is the reason for such incredulity. Yuji is Japanese. He is a yellow man. A native. The daughter of a European gentleman might have such a person as a friend — it would almost be a mark of her breeding — but more than that?

‘It was me,’ repeats Yuji, tonelessly. Then, his face in a spasm, he shouts it in French. ‘C’était moi! C’était moi! Je suis le coupable!’

On the little finger of Feneon’s right hand he wears a ring with a stone in it, a bevelled garnet of some sort, a semi-precious. It is this that opens Yuji’s lip. He falls backwards, is caught by the chair, and sits there, dazed, watching spots of blood fall in dark irregular splashes onto his coat. After a moment he focuses on Feneon’s hand holding out a handkerchief. He takes the handkerchief, presses it to his mouth. In the quiet between them the house moves through its repertory of small sounds, the fizzing of the lamp, the settling of boards.

‘It’s true?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not some idiotic fancy of yours?’

‘Fancy?’

‘One of your stupid ideas. Not true.’

‘It’s true,’ says Yuji. ‘It must be true.’

‘Must be?’

‘It’s true.’

‘It happened here?’

Yuji nods.

‘Here in the house?’

‘You were away.’

‘So you sneaked in like a thief.’

‘Yes,’ says Yuji. ‘Like a thief.’

‘I used to keep a pistol in this desk,’ says Feneon. ‘You should be very happy that I no longer do.’ He sits, seems momentarily lost, then pulls a clean sheet of paper towards him, unscrews the cap from the pen, writes three lines and tosses the paper onto the floor by Yuji’s feet.

‘Can you read it? It’s where she is. In Yokohama. You will go there tomorrow or you will never see Alissa or myself again. It goes without saying that you would never be permitted to see the child.’

Yuji stands. He does not know if his lip has stopped bleeding. The handkerchief is heavily stained, probably ruined. He folds it, hiding as much of his blood as possible, then reaches out to leave it on the edge of the desk.

‘No, no,’ says Feneon, ‘I don’t want it back.’

7

The house whose address is scratched in large, angry letters on the piece of paper is a rambling foreign-style building on a quiet avenue high on the Yokohama Bluff. Brown shutters, a first-floor balcony with white wooden railings, a three-storey wooden tower, a small clock above its two upper windows like a mystical eye. On a board beside the porch a sign in English and Kanji reads, ‘The Bullseye Piano Academy. Lessons by appointment only.’ Across the windows of the ground floor, heavy, wine-red curtains have been drawn.

Yuji pulls the bell (a kind of stirrup on a chain), hears a remote jangling in the house’s interior. He waits. No one comes. His heart is beating so hard that he has, after a minute, to turn away to catch his breath. He rings again. Another minute, then the door slowly opens and a face peeps out, young and blonde with dark eyes.

‘You delivering?’ she asks.

‘Delivering?’

‘We’re not open for hours.’

‘I was hoping to visit someone . .’

‘Do we know you?’

‘Miss Feneon?’

‘Who?’

‘Alissa?’

‘Everyone’s in bed.’

‘Ah. I’m sorry.’

She nibbles the edge of a painted fingernail, examines him, this handsome, somewhat battered young man, then steps out of sight and swings open the door. ‘You can wait if you want. Miss Ogilvy will be down soon.’

The room he follows her into is large enough for a public dance. Certainly, shadowed by the curtains, it looks grand enough. She tugs a braided cord at the side of one of the windows, lets in enough of the morning to wake the mirrors and bring a glow to the gilded frames of the paintings — pictures of women beside pools of water, women in gowns on day beds, women combing out their hair. In the centre of the room is a billiard table, two cues laid side by side across one of its corners. There are no pianos.

‘I’m Sandrine,’ says the girl, sitting herself up on the ledge of the table. ‘It’s funny how you’ve both got sticks. You and Alissa.’

Her Japanese, though comprehensible, is thickly accented. She is wearing a robe of pale tangerine and on her feet a pair of yellow slippers that curl extravagantly at the toes.

‘This is Miss Ogilvy’s house?’ asks Yuji.

She tilts her head. ‘You don’t know much, do you.’

‘Are you a pupil here?’

‘A pupil?’

‘At the academy?’

‘What academy?’

‘The piano academy.’

‘Oh.’ She taps the curls of her slippers together, smiles at him. ‘I’m very musical.’

She brings him, unrequested, a glass balloon of brandy. He has seen these glasses before but never drunk from one. For herself she has a smaller glass of something green, then perches again on the billiard table and tells Yuji about a great-uncle of hers who had both legs amputated in a war with the Austrians.

‘That must be difficult for him,’ says Yuji.

She laughs as though he has said something extremely funny, then immediately stops laughing and slides off the table.

‘This is Alissa’s friend,’ she says to the woman silhouetted in the doorway.

The woman looks at Yuji, nods very slightly in response to his bow. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I was warned to expect you.’ She turns to Sandrine, addresses her in a language Yuji can only guess at. Russian, perhaps. Turkish, Farsi. The girl hangs her head, answers meekly, then hurries from the room, scuffing the leather soles of her slippers and leaving the little glass of green liquor behind her.

‘I won’t have them drinking in the morning,’ says the woman. ‘I would be grateful if you did not encourage it. They do not need much encouragement.’

Yuji apologises. It is, in the circumstances, easier to apologise.

‘Can you speak English?’ she asks.

He tells her he cannot.

‘French, presumably?’

‘Yes. Some.’

‘I am Miss Ogilvy,’ she says. ‘I speak six languages, including, self-evidently, your own. By birth I am a citizen of the United States of America. Battle Creek in Michigan. It is a place you will not have heard of.’

‘I would like to visit America,’ says Yuji.

‘Have you travelled at all? Have you ever been outside Japan?’

‘Unfortunately,’ says Yuji, picturing to himself the map in Horikawa’s office, the black lines sealing the coasts, ‘that has not been possible.’

‘Yet I am informed you have pretensions to being a writer. A writer, even a Japanese one, must surely travel, if only for the stimulus of disappointment.’ She scoops up a silent grey cat from the rug between her feet, strokes it with her wrist. She is taller than Yuji, thin, very upright. Her hair is of a kind that does not exist in Japan, fine and finely crinkled, brown, auburn, dyed. She is certainly old enough to be Sandrine’s mother.

‘Very well,’ she says. ‘Let us talk of the matter in hand. You are here to see Alissa.’

‘Yes.’

‘You are her friend.’

‘Yes.’

‘You are the one responsible for her condition.’

‘I . . Yes.’

‘The baby, in Dr Saramago’s estimate, will be born two weeks from today. On this occasion I happen to agree with him, though babies are not trains. They do not arrive according to a timetable.’ She watches him with her small, brazen eyes. ‘What do you know about babies, Mr Takano?’

‘Know?’

‘Do you, for example, like them?’

‘Hmm. It’s quite difficult to say.’

‘I don’t see it’s difficult at all.’

‘It’s only . . I have not met many.’

‘Babies are everywhere. You do not need to be specifically introduced to one. I wonder,’ she says, ‘if you have the stomach for this. Being afraid, of course, is not itself a disgrace. Your life is about to be altered in a manner you apparently did not expect it to be. You will be a father, and whatever arrangement you come to with Alissa, that will remain inescapably the case. The question, then, is this: are you sincere?

‘Sincere?’

‘In your wish to be here. In your intention to behave with rather more practical decency than you seem to have felt necessary in the past. Nothing more, given the circumstances, can reasonably be expected of you. But neither can anything less.’ She sets down the cat. Immediately it starts to wind itself round her narrow, stockinged ankles. ‘I will give you a quarter of an hour to reflect. It is quite enough time to finish your refreshment and leave the house, if that is what you choose. If, however, you are still here when I return, then I will assume you wish me to understand you are indeed sincere. That we are to trust you.’

She wheels from him, walks out, followed by the prancing cat. For several seconds Yuji is as motionless as the women in the pictures, then he sets his glass balloon on the mantelpiece, limps to the billiard table, and spends the minutes granted him, precious minutes in which he ought to be grappling with the question of his sincerity (though the problem feels impervious to normal thought, almost mystical), rolling a billiard ball against one of the baize side-cushions. He does not hear her return. Her voice startles him.

‘Very well,’ she says. ‘Shall we go up?’

Alissa’s room is on the second floor at the end of the house furthest from the clock tower. It is slightly larger than her room in Kanda, its walls decorated with pink paper that light and time have faded to a blush. Opposite the door is a sash window looking towards the sea, where a pair of fishing boats, black shapes on the glittering swell, are making their patient progress from frame to painted frame.

Miss Ogilvy picks up a towel, a dirty cup. ‘Do not,’ she says to Alissa in briskly enunciated French, ‘tire yourself out with talking.’

When she has gone, when the clip of her footfall has faded along the corridor, Yuji and Alissa are like shy children left by a well-meaning adult to become friends. At last, still stood by the door, Yuji looks up to where she is sitting in the floral armchair beside the window. She is wrapped in a rose-coloured gown, a fringe of flannel nightdress showing below the hem. Her hair, black as his own, is plaited and tied with a ribbon. She looks both exactly as he remembered her and entirely different, a change that is not simply the swollen abdomen on which she rests a small protective hand.

‘Papa called last night,’ she says. ‘I don’t know which of us he is more angry with. He said he hit you.’

‘Not so hard.’

‘It must have been hard if you need a walking stick.’

‘That was something else. A fall.’

‘He had no right to hit you.’

‘Please. It is not important.’

‘He had no right.’

Yuji nods, looks to the window. ‘It’s a nice view,’ he says.

‘Yes.’

‘The sea . .’

‘Yes. It’s restful.’

‘Good.’

‘They’ve been very kind to me,’ she says. ‘All of them. Miss Ogilvy especially.’

‘Miss Ogilvy?’

‘I know she can appear rather fierce at first. It’s only because she has to keep everyone in order.’

‘She told me I should travel.’

‘That sounds like her.’

‘And that I must not encourage her students to drink.’

‘It was one of the girls?’

‘Sandrine?’

‘I expect she was encouraging you, wasn’t she?’

‘It seemed like that.’

From under the edge of the counterpane a seal-grey head appears, a black nose, two eyes sticky with sleep. Seeing Yuji, the animal sneezes and waddles over to him.

‘She has to stay in here because of the cats,’ says Alissa. ‘Dr Saramago doesn’t approve, but Miss Ogilvy says the Portuguese don’t understand dogs. Horses but not dogs. She has opinions on every nationality you can think of. Lots on the Japanese, of course.’ She gives Yuji a quick smile, then seeing how his attention returns again and again to her belly, the evidence of her belly, she says, ‘I can’t get used to it either. Being so . . big.’

‘It hurts you?’

‘A little. At night, mostly. It depends on where the baby is.’

‘Ah . .’ Yuji puts on a most serious face. He has no idea what she means. Where can it be? Sitting on the end of the bed?

‘They move,’ she says. ‘They sleep, wake . .’

‘Is it sleeping now?’

‘No. Awake, I think.’ Then, after a pause, ‘It’s probably listening to us.’

She is teasing him, of course. Surely, she is teasing him, but the thought of a foetal witness to this scene, of a baby, his child, theirs, sitting the other side of her skin listening to everything . . He searches her face for some hint of levity, but she is not smiling now. She is gazing at him intently, nakedly.

‘Papa said Junzo told you.’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘Two nights ago.’

‘Just two nights!’

‘We met . . by chance.’

She shakes her head, and for the first time a note of irritation enters her voice. ‘A pity you couldn’t have met by chance three months ago. There isn’t much time now. Will they send him to China?’

‘Probably.’

‘And you?’

‘I don’t know. One day, I suppose.’

‘This horrible war.’

‘Yes.’

‘I can’t even bear to read a newspaper. I look at these’ — she gestures to the little pile of magazines on the side-table — ‘read about knitting and colic and what husbands like for supper.’

‘I don’t read as much as I used to,’ says Yuji. ‘I have become quite busy.’

‘It’s nice that you’ve come,’ she says. ‘I don’t really know why you’ve come. Perhaps it doesn’t matter.’

He opens his mouth. She silences him with a movement of her hand. ‘Don’t explain,’ she says. ‘I’m not angry with you. I was at first. Then I was sad. Now all I want is for the baby to be safe. You see, it’s really going to happen. It’s not just an idea, something to amuse ourselves talking about. It’s a real baby who’s going to grow up, who’s going to . .’ Her face creases. In Yuji something comes undone, some strapping of the heart. He would like to yell, let out a shout so loud the men on the fishing boats would hear him. He steps towards her, tries to crouch at her feet, but his knee is too sore, too stiff. He stands again, wincing.

She wipes her eyes, grins at him. ‘Look at us,’ she says, ‘with our sticks.’

8

He visits every day, sometimes for an hour, sometimes for a whole morning or afternoon. They meet in her room or in the small dining room at the back of the house, or, on fine days, on the bench between the eucalyptus trees in the little salt-stunted garden. When she is not too tired and her ankles are not swollen, they walk in the winter sunshine, sticks in hand, Beatrice trotting contentedly at their heels. The awkwardness of the first encounter, of the second and the third, the confidences that awkwardness inspired, gives way to a gentle, mutual reticence. They talk together, easily, fluently, but sound, even to themselves, like strangers enjoying an unexpected friendship at a holiday resort. Little is said about the recent past, the three seasons since they knelt side by side in the dark to watch Kasane. Little is said about the life that sits or walks with them in her belly. And when, now and then, a silence between them fills with the weight of unspoken thoughts, there is always something to rescue them, some task, some antic of the dog, some intriguing or comical behaviour from one of Miss Ogilvy’s ‘girls’.

Of these, there are six, all foreigners: Sandrine, Rose, Kitty, Eva, Natasha, Mary. In the beginning, Yuji has difficulty telling them apart. All seem slightly blurred by strong perfume, and all, dressed in fabrics delicate as tissue paper, seem always to have just emerged from bed or bath. They are kind to him, treat him, he thinks, like a pet. He does not, after his second visit, expect to hear one of them play the piano.

That the academy might be an unsuitable place for a woman in Alissa’s condition, a surprising place for Monsieur Feneon to be connected to, an altogether curious institution with a way of doing things that would — or so he guesses — not be much understood in the more traditional parts of the pleasure quarters . . these are questions he turns over, with no great urgency, like loose change in his pocket. After all, there is no one to discuss it with, no one, yet, to be scandalised. And who is he — a person Feneon might have felt entitled to shoot — to raise so much as an eyebrow?

It is Rose (or perhaps Natasha) who tells Yuji, four days before the term Miss Ogilvy spoke of has expired, about the breaking of Alissa’s waters. It is just after midday. The girl is helping him with his coat, tugging it clumsily off his shoulders in her excitement. ‘Isn’t it blissful?’ she says. ‘We were afraid you’d come too late.’

He waits in the empty billiard room, looking at the painted nymphs and the dimpled, slyly smiling wives of European aristocrats, and wonders about this water they contain that breaks (like porcelain? Like a wave?).

After half an hour the door by the fireplace opens and Dr Saramago comes in. He is wearing a pearl-grey three-piece suit. He is fat and surprisingly young. He has been upstairs with Alissa. ‘Not worrying,’ he says, breezily. ‘Baby later. Time for last sleep.’ He laughs (as if out of a well of cooking oil in his throat), takes a fur coat from the back of a chair, pats Yuji’s shoulder and leaves. A few minutes later Miss Ogilvy appears, crisp white apron, a dress with rolled sleeves, a rolled cigarette in her left hand.

‘There are contractions,’ she says, ‘but true labour has yet to commence. You may go and see her.’

Alissa is in the bed. Her head, her narrow shoulders are raised on a heap of pillows. There is a fire in the grate, and since his visit the previous day a table has appeared at the end of the bed, a card table with towels on it, bundles of white gauze, a tin basin, a large pair of scissors. For two nauseating seconds Yuji remembers Saburo’s story about the doctors in China. Now, then, gentlemen, shall we start with the appendix?

‘Saramago,’ he says, ‘looks like an American gangster.’

She manages a smile. ‘He’s nice,’ she says. ‘He brings us little custard cakes to eat.’

Under the sheet, her body radiates a kind of imminence. The whole room is charged with it, a tension that has reached its perfection.

‘I suppose it will be soon now,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Will you be here?’

‘Here?’

‘At the house?’

‘Yes. If you would like me to.’

‘Yes,’ she says, then shuts her eyes, clutches a corner of the sheet in her fist, moans. It is a sound she made the night they were together in her room in Kanda. She turns to Yuji, no attempt to hide the fear in her face. ‘What if I can’t do it?’ she says. ‘Saramago says he has things to help me. Miss Ogilvy says at my age it will be easy. But what if they’re wrong?’

‘They’re not,’ says Yuji, suddenly appalled at how little there is he can do for her. He steps up to the bed, reaches his fingertips to where the sheet is tented over her belly. ‘Shall I fetch Miss Ogilvy?’

She nods. ‘You don’t need to love me,’ she says as he opens the door. ‘But you must love the child. Will you love the child?’

At three o’clock Dr Saramago returns. He smells of lunch, of China Town. He is upstairs for fifteen minutes, then comes down and leads Yuji to the billiard table. Yuji is good at billiards — he has had more time than most to practise it — but Saramago beats him easily.

‘Next time, shogi,’ says the doctor, grinning and carefully tying a little scarf around his throat. When asked about Alissa, about the baby, he makes an unrolling gesture with his right hand, something that might be readily understood in Porto or Lisbon but which tells Yuji nothing.

At six o’clock the doors are opened and the first of the evening’s visitors arrive, a pair of naval officers, glamorous in caps and long military coats. Yuji is sent to wait in a room on the first floor of the tower. From the window he can see the lights of the neighbouring building. He buttons his jacket. There are radiators in the house, brass concertinas that gurgle and rattle like live things but give off very little useful heat, certainly not enough for the high-ceilinged rooms of the academy. He looks for something to read, finds in the bucket by the empty fireplace a newspaper from May 1938, reads a story about the fall of Swatow, then drops the paper on the boards and begins to pace. Behind a curtain in the far corner of the room is a painted door. He tries the handle. The door is not locked but leads only into a cupboard, its floor piled with women’s shoes, women’s boots. On a shelf at the back is a row of featureless wooden heads each with a coloured wig on it — black, blond, curly red — and from a hook below the shelf hangs a coil of buckled leather he mistakes at first for a horse’s bridle.

In the billiard room, drunken voices sing along to the gramophone. (Is the music louder than usual tonight? Is there something the gentlemen should not be allowed to hear?) When it stops, Yuji dozes in a chair, wakes several times imagining his name has been called, then falls into a deeper sleep from which he is roused by someone standing over him with a lantern — Father, perhaps, come to tell him it’s time for his watch on the platform.

‘The electricity is off,’ says Miss Ogilvy. ‘The child was born by candlelight.’

He follows her, her lantern, up a flight of stairs and along the corridor. Nothing waking could have more perfectly the character of a dream. Not just the uncertain light ahead of him, or the dark figure whose shadow is so weirdly thrown on the corridor walls, but the sense that with each step on the worn carpet his old self, like something useless, something used and finished, is falling away, blowing from him like a dust, like fine ashes.

In the room the candles burn in little clusters. Three on the card table, three on the windowsill, five or six on the mantelpiece. All Miss Ogilvy’s girls are there, one of them sitting on Saramago’s expanse of pearl-grey lap. As Yuji arrives, they twitter with excitement, they rustle, then fall silent and turn adoringly to the propped-up figure of Alissa, the dark bundle lying at the opening of her nightgown.

Out of the hush — a hush that seems entirely theatrical — Alissa says, ‘A little boy.’

‘A little boy,’ repeats Yuji. ‘Yes.’ Then, ‘Thank you.’

Saramago erupts with laughter. Miss Ogilvy shoos the girls from the bed, prods Yuji, quite sharply, in the small of the back. He sits on the bed. The baby is wrapped in a towel, its face pressed against one of Alissa’s breasts. It grunts as it sucks, groans like a dreaming dog. The girls, craning over the bed, sigh with pleasure. To Yuji the desperate sucking seems comical, slightly sinister.

‘Look,’ says Alissa, slipping the towel from the baby’s head to reveal a half-dozen luxuriant wisps of slick black hair. Japanese hair? Western hair? Eurasian? With a finger — and how expert she is already, how much the mother — she draws her swollen nipple from the baby’s mouth. ‘Hold him,’ she says. ‘Take him.’

She shows him how to make a cradle of his arms, then leans forward and gently, very gently, rolls the baby from her arms to his. He feels its heat, the restless stretching of its body. There is something oddly dense about the weight of it, as if its life was rolled up tightly inside it like the sticky wing of an insect. It moves its dark-palmed hands, curls its feet, then rolls its face blindly towards his chest. A tip of tongue pokes out, touches the wool of his shirt. The eyes flutter in startlement. The ignorance of it! The utter helplessness! And this is his son? This scrap? It starts to squall. It becomes rage. Immediately he holds it out to Alissa, feels a moment of awe and resentment at how swiftly her presence soothes it.

Behind him, one of the girls comes in, bottles in her arms, dark green bells of champagne. Saramago opens them. Miss Ogilvy gives Yuji a glass. He turns to Alissa. She taps a fingernail against the rim of his glass. He drinks. Someone opens the window a little. There is the distant droning of an aircraft, of several aircraft. ‘What on earth are they doing flying at this hour?’ asks Miss Ogilvy. After a while the window is shut again.

9

Chains of coloured paper are hung in swags along the walls of the billiard room. A large Christmas tree is carried in by Yuji and the Chinese houseboy. The girls decorate it with the utmost seriousness. At the top they place a doll, a winged doll, an angel.

There are cards, lanterns — also a little carousel of brass reindeer, their movement powered by the heat of candles. When shown to the baby, he throws back his arms and squawks with excitement, though shown it a second time he seems indifferent.

He’s too intelligent for such a toy,’ says Feneon, grandly. ‘Already he has escaped from Plato’s cave.’

‘What nonsense you talk,’ says Miss Ogilvy, sponging a smear of regurgitated milk from the Frenchman’s lapel.

In the six days since the birth Feneon has been a regular caller at the academy. The girls all seem to know him well, treat him like an indulgent father, are openly amused by Miss Ogilvy’s rudeness to him.

To Yuji, Feneon has offered — with an ironic cocking of an eyebrow — his felicitations on the birth of a healthy son. If he is still angry with Yuji, he hides it well enough for them to speak to each other in civil tones, and for now at least the baby heals everything, distracts everyone, creates, in every room it lies in, a feeling of reverence, of incontinent hope.

At Miss Ogilvy’s suggestion, Alissa and Yuji have named the child Emile. It would, she assured them, appeal to Feneon’s vanity, it would mollify him, and though, on learning of it, Feneon protested, his delight was obvious. Emile. Baby Emile. Little Emile. When not in his mother’s arms or on Feneon’s knee, he is passed among the girls. Yuji, too, takes his turn, reluctantly at first, unable to free himself from the paralysing fear of dropping him, but as he grows in confidence he finds himself falling under the same fascination the others surrendered themselves to so eagerly. Shyly, then openly, he dots the child’s brow with kisses, inhales the bready, powdery, new-animal scent of the warm black hair. At home, he notices his clothes have started to smell of the baby. Can anyone else smell it? His neighbours? Miyo?

‘I presume your parents know nothing of all this,’ says Feneon one evening, as they ride an empty carriage back into Tokyo together. ‘The longer you leave it, the more difficult it will become. The more painful for them.’

Is he speaking from experience? How, Yuji would like to ask (and only in part to embarrass him), did you tell your parents about Alissa? Or were the thousands of miles between Sézanne and Saigon sufficient for the secret of a child, a lost mother, to be kept for ever? As for his own parents, what in his past dealings with them can reliably tell him how they will respond to the news of a bastard, half-caste grandson? Certainly he knows of cases where a son or daughter has been formally renounced, and for behaviour, for acts, far milder than his own might appear.

On the morning of Christmas Eve he tells Miyo he will be away for the night. He leaves her money to go to the New Year markets. He will be in Yokohama. She should go to the Otakis if she needs help. She nods. She does not ask him any questions, though there is something in the way she looks at him that makes it clear she has reached her own conclusion about nights away in Yokohama.

At midnight in the Bullseye Piano Academy the last visitors are guided — or waltzed, in the case of one beaming, red-faced old gentleman, the under-secretary of something — to the front door. The last taxi pulls away. The glasses and ashtrays and empty bottles of Monopole and Hennessy are carried to the kitchen.

When everything is in good order again, when the fire has been fed and poked into fresh life, they gather on the rug or draw up chairs, their palms held out to the flames. Emile is sprawled asleep on a blanket by Alissa’s feet. Yuji kneels beside him. Natasha plays the guitar. They sing Christmas songs, Christmas carols. Most of these Yuji has never heard before, but one, ‘Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht’, is familiar to him. Mother — who must have been taught it by Grandfather Yakumo — used to sing it when he and Ryuichi were little boys, and because he has only ever heard it in her voice, he has always thought of it as somehow being a Japanese song, though now the foreigners are singing it, half joyfully, half sadly, he sees that it’s theirs, that it comes out of their world.

After the singing, Feneon and Miss Ogilvy bring in the parcels that have lain so enticingly for days on the table in the back dining room. They spread them by the bottom of the tree. Rose — the youngest after Emile — reads out the names, reads out the doggerel that accompanies some of the names, and hands the parcel (with some ceremony, some giggling) to the recipient. Everybody has something. There are perfume bottles, ribbons, brooches, silken underwear. Alissa has a hat with a fox-fur brim, Yuji a tie with jagged orange stripes (a jazz tie!). For Emile, there are wooden toys and toys of tin, a pair of lamb’s-wool booties, a Chinese-style jacket hardly bigger than a man’s handkerchief.

‘Shall we be able to do this next year?’ asks Feneon, swirling the last of his brandy and letting his gaze rest on Alissa, on Emile.

‘We are doing it this year,’ says Miss Ogilvy. ‘And that is what matters. A grandfather should be wise enough to know that.’

At bedtime — whatever time that is, three, four o’clock — Yuji has a mattress in the room where he waited the night Emile was born. (‘You,’ Miss Ogilvy informed him simply, ‘are in the tower. You know where to go.’) He lies there, slightly drunk, wondering if Alissa is upstairs listening for his footsteps or if, with the baby beside her, she is already fast asleep. What is he to her now? What is he supposed to be? Do the others all assume something? If they do, he wishes someone would tell him what it is. As for what he wants. . He peers into the speckled dark of the room, moves his life around like the pieces of a puzzle, but just as the suspicion starts to grow in him that a life, his or anyone’s, is not a puzzle at all but something quite different, something that does not admit of solutions, he is lying on his arm softly snoring and dreaming of Mother singing in a voice thin as wire, ‘Schlaf in Himmlischer Ruh, schlafe in Himmlischer Ruh.’

At mid-morning the house downstairs is deserted. Yuji takes a walk. He does not need his stick now. His knee has healed and the burns are no more than patches of raw new skin. When he comes back, he finds Sandrine and Mary turning the billiard table into a dining table. He helps them lift the heavy wooden lid, spread the spotless linen. The cats leap up, are chased off before they leave a trail of prints. In the kitchen, in swirls of steam, Miss Ogilvy, with two of the girls, is preparing dinner. (‘You can’t ask a Chinese to cook a Christmas dinner.’) There is a roast duck, trays of sweet potatoes, a great saucepan of red cabbage. The pudding is a ball wrapped in muslin. Apparently it has to boil for hours.

It is dark again before everything is ready, the table set, the girls in their best clothes, the wine decanted. Miss Ogilvy takes photographs with her Leica and flashgun. Everyone together, then the girls in various demure poses by the mantelpiece. ‘Now,’ she says, ‘the new family.’ A chair is put out for Alissa and Emile. Yuji stands beside them. When Feneon is urged to join them he says he will, gladly, but first it should be just mother, father, son.

‘As you wish,’ says Miss Ogilvy, screwing a fresh bulb into the flashgun.

The baby is restless. Alissa settles him with a touch, then smiles up nervously at Yuji.

‘At the camera, please!’ calls Miss Ogilvy.

They turn to her, compose themselves. She lifts the gun. The light, white and chemical blue, is blinding, and for an instant it prints their shadows thickly on the far wall.

10

New Year is spent with Grandfather. Yuji travels to Setagaya with Miyo. Mr Fujitomi is there. He has brought his wife and sister with him. After eating, they go by taxi to a shrine next to the railway station, a small place compared with the one in Hongo, old, unfashionable. They take Grandfather’s wheelchair. Yuji pushes it. How heavy the old man is, a dead weight, a dragging, dead weight.

Chief Priest Takashita comes out to welcome Grandfather personally. He presents him with a scroll on which a snake is drawn beside certain verses from The Chronicle of Ancient Matters petitioning good health.

They don’t stay for long. Grandfather looks at Sonoko, who looks at Yuji, who turns the chair round. The taxi is waiting for them, the driver flicking through a magazine of fortune-telling.

At the house, the Fujitomis remain for a last flask of sake. Yuji sits with his secrets. Even Mr Fujitomi seems distracted. Has he heard anything from China? How long since the last letter? Grandfather is growling. His lower lip droops, trembles. When Sonoko does not immediately translate for him, he tries to slap her leg.

‘He says,’ she says, ‘Japan is finished.’

The others look politely interested. All day and all night the streets have been full of a fine white mist.

11

As soon as the holidays are over and the academy is open for business again, Alissa moves back to the house in Kanda. It is easier now, much easier for Yuji to visit. He can go for an hour in the morning, then meet Fujitomi in the Low City before returning to the house for another hour in the evening. He is pleased, yet he also understands that the move’s indiscretion, its indifference to local scandal, means the hour of separation is not far away.

On the evening of 15 January, the day families gather to eat New Year gruel, he crosses the garden through a cold west wind to find Alissa and Emile asleep on the sofa in the salon. Feneon is sitting with his back to the stove, the dog on his lap, a newspaper spread across the table in front of him. He greets Yuji with a nod, and after folding away the paper, he fetches his chessboard from the study. In silence they make their opening moves, exchange pawns, clear the lines for more powerful pieces to enter the fray. It’s Feneon’s turn. After studying the board for a minute, he looks up at Yuji and says, ‘I hope I can trust you to be discreet?’

A few months ago and the question would have felt slighting. Yuji would have brooded on it. Now it is merely part of the new honesty between them, the new froideur.

‘I shall be leaving soon for Singapore. The British have a large garrison on the island and there’s an English planter there, a man called Farrell, who I was able to help with some trouble in Saigon. He will, he assures me, now repay the favour. As soon as I have found a suitable house, I will send for Alissa and Emile. It should only be a matter of a few weeks, perhaps a month, but during that time they will be entirely in your care.’

There is no mention, no hint of the possibility of Yuji accompanying them. Is this how Feneon will free his daughter from her unfortunate connection? Or is it simply that Feneon, a practical man, understands as well as Yuji the impossibility of it? How, in better times, in Taisho times, a person like Professor Takano might go abroad, might even live there a season or two while he studied its ways, but now, for any young man — even one with a Class F exemption — to leave these islands without khaki on his back would be tantamount to desertion? He could never come home. He would have no home to come to.

‘I will care for them,’ says Yuji, quietly.

‘Thank you,’ says Feneon, using his bishop to knock over Yuji’s knight. ‘That’s settled, then.’

The luggage — four trunks of battered tin, each with the markings of earlier journeys, the smudged chalk of a cabin number, a pasted-on, half-torn-off address in Bombay, Macau, Cholon — is sent to the Bullseye Academy and then, the day before the sailing, down to the docks to be loaded onto the San Cristobal da Lisboa. The San Cristobal is bound for Shanghai. From there a second ship will take Feneon to Hong Kong, where a steamer of the Peninsular and Oriental Company will complete the journey to Singapore.

Alissa, Emile and Feneon have accompanied the trunks to the academy. Yuji joins them the morning of Feneon’s departure. The weather, turbulent all week, has settled again and a phone call to the agents confirms the ship will sail at the appointed hour of three in the afternoon. They decide on an early lunch, but as soon as they sit down Alissa begins to weep like a child. She tries but cannot stop herself. Feneon takes her outside, returns five minutes later holding her hand. At the table, he tells tales of shipboard encounters, the Irish priest he once shared a cabin with on a crossing of the Arabian Sea, the Romanian countess who travelled with a wolf cub. Miss Ogilvy accuses him of invention, of being little better than a novelist, a romancier, but she has laughed along with the others.

The taxi comes at one.

‘We’ll say our goodbyes here,’ says Feneon. ‘No handkerchiefs waving from the quayside, please.’

The girls form a line. He embraces each in turn, embraces Miss Ogilvy, wipes the small tear from her cheek. He takes the baby in his arms, kisses him until he writhes in protest, then holds his daughter, strokes her hair, gently untangles himself. To Yuji he says, ‘Did I ever apologise for hitting you?’ He reaches into a pocket of his overcoat. ‘This came to light while I was packing. I have no use for it now and perhaps it will make up for any unpleasantness between us.’

He kisses his daughter again, kisses his grandson, picks up Beatrice who, half demented with jealousy of the baby, will travel with him, and goes to the door. Through the window Yuji sees him getting into the car. The driver shuts the door. Feneon looks back at the house, smiles and turns away.

The girls immediately surround Alissa. They seem primed for dramas of this kind, of any kind. They are not reserved, not coolly secretive like the women in the paintings. Whatever they feel is played out on their faces without hesitation. Yuji moves away from them and looks at the envelope in his hand. There is a stamp with a lion on it, and an address written in ink faded to the colour of dried blood: ‘19 rue saint-Maur, Sézanne, France.’ The paper is mottled, stained by time, by the immense journeys it has made. It is beautiful. He smiles at it. He almost prefers not to read it at all but to go on imagining it, the precious content, as if he was one of the old poets picturing the moon from behind drawn blinds. Then the thought seems idiotic, unworthy of such a gift, and he tugs the letter through the ragged lips of the envelope and tilts it towards the afternoon light.

For two minutes the handwriting is completely impenetrable. He begins to panic. To have it in his hands and not be able to read it! Unbearable! He starts again, scans each crabbed line as calmly, as methodically as he can. Single words appear — silence . . newspapers . . money . . dogs . . God . . Then clusters of words — I never find . . half of Europe . . into his fields . . backs of carts . . Then at last, he has it. It speaks.

Harar, 4 February 1890

My dear Feneon,

Excuse my long silence. I never find anything interesting to say! Deserts full of stupid niggers, no roads, no mail, no travellers.

I haven’t seen a French newspaper in weeks. For all I know half of Europe is dead with the pox. Well, so much the better — though naturally I hope a good Christian family like yours is spared!

My last caravan was a disaster. Did you hear of it? A year of incredible hardships and damn all to show except more creditors. Monsieur Ilg reproaches me for not giving the drivers sufficient provisions. He says he had to put the donkeys into his fields because they were covered in sores and too weak to continue. But is that really my fault? You know how things are here. Why should I be blamed?

As a result of all I have endured, the endless walking and riding in this damned country, I have varicose veins in my right leg that keep me awake all night. I’ve ordered some special stockings from Aden but I doubt they’ll have them. I shall probably have to write to Mother and see if she can buy some in Vouziers. The silk ones are meant to be best, though the important thing is that there should be enough elastic in them. They also need to be long enough to give support to the whole leg and not just the knee, and they should be adjustable with some sort of lacing. In the meantime I shall have to struggle on as best I can, though the truth is I feel more like a dog tethered to the back of a cart than a human being. One day I’ll stumble and some thoughtful bastard will cut me loose and leave me for the vultures. A charming prospect, don’t you think?

Yours, with a feeble handshake,

A. Rimbaud

12

Miss Ogilvy offers Alissa her old pink bedroom at the academy. She will be safe there, and comfortable, until her father can send for her, but Alissa, with a smile, a shake of her head, leaves with Yuji and Emile for the early evening train to Tokyo. It’s the slow train, the local. At each stop the carriage becomes more crowded. Alissa keeps her eyes lowered, holds the sleeping baby tightly in her arms. Yuji stands over them, gripping the ceiling strap. He is aware of people, women particularly, trying to get a clear view of the baby’s face. One man, heavily drunk, looks as if he might pass a remark, but his courage fails him or he is too drunk to speak. He sits on the carriage floor, lets out a sigh as if of death, and falls asleep.

By the time the taxi drops them off in Kanda it has started to snow again. Alissa gives Yuji the house key. In the salon, he quickly cleans the ashes from the stove and builds a fire. When it catches, he swings shut the iron door, adjusts the vents, and feels a surge of primal satisfaction, the pleasure of bringing warmth where it is needed, of bringing it to those who have been entrusted to him.

‘You really think he’ll be all right?’ asks Alissa, a question she has already put to Yuji four or five times since Feneon’s departure. His words, for now, have the power to calm her, and this too gives him pleasure. ‘He will,’ he says, emphatically. She nods and busies herself with the baby.

They have brought a parcel of food with them from the academy, remains of the lunch no one had much appetite for. In the kitchen there are a last few bottles of wine. They open one, touch glasses. ‘He was born out of a bottle of wine,’ she says, blushing and looking down at the sleeping head by her thigh. They pick at the food, grow drowsy. A glance past the shutters into the garden shows the snow still falling heavily.

‘You won’t get home tonight,’ she says. Yuji agrees. ‘You could use Papa’s room,’ she adds, quickly. ‘It’s nicer than the spare room. There are blankets and sheets in the cupboard beside the kitchen.’

He tries to call Miyo but it seems the lines have been affected by the weather. All he can hear in the receiver is something like the whispering, the urgent whispering of phantom voices.

At ten Alissa goes upstairs with Emile. Yuji makes the bed in Feneon’s room, puts out the light. The snow rubs its blunt fingers against the window. The city of millions is silent . . Then the baby starts to wail, that sound Yuji is becoming so familiar with, that he seems to hear half a second before it begins. He sits up, willing it to stop, but it grows louder, an utterly intemperate sound, inhuman, like a giant cicada. Should he go in? Can he help? Would she welcome his help? He swings his legs to the edge of the bed but as his toes touch the floor the crying ceases, mid-phrase, leaving behind it a deep and brittle hush. He waits, then slowly lies his head on the bolster again, pulls up the blanket. He is tired but he knows that something in him will go on listening. Something in him will never stop listening now.

In the morning he tramps through the snow to the bakery, the one the Russian priests used to go to. There’s a queue. There’s always a queue now where food is sold. On his way back to the house, he is stopped by Ooka the bookseller. ‘If the Frenchman left any nice books behind, why don’t you bring them over to the stall? Nothing improper, of course, nothing unpatriotic, but there’s still a market with the students for foreign stuff.’

Alissa eats half a loaf of dark bread, smothering the slices in jam. She drinks warm milk flavoured with cinnamon, and into the last glass breaks an egg, laughing at her own appetite. When she has finished, she passes Emile to Yuji and stretches out on the sofa. In less than a minute she’s asleep. Yuji puts more wood on the stove, then sits on the rug opposite the sofa, the baby across his knees. Alissa is in her nightclothes still. The unbuttoned gown hangs open over the skin of one of her breasts. He stares at the edge, the seashell-pink rim of visible nipple, then looks away, frowns at the patterns in the rug and attempts to correct his thinking. Her breasts are for feeding the child. Their fullness is from the milk they carry. She is a mother (that object of universal veneration), a nursing mother, and yet the atmosphere around her, around her and the child, around all three of them, is drowsy and voluptuous and not at all what he might have imagined. He seems to be in a continuous state of mild arousal. Do all new fathers feel like this, everything sunk into the body? And what about the women? Was the ‘ghost’ an animal once, heavy as the one now sleeping with lips slightly parted on the sofa?

Day after day through the snowfalls of early February he makes his way down to Kanda. He sleeps in Feneon’s room (the bed with the brass headboard, the springs that creak atonally every time he moves) more nights than he sleeps at home. He makes no effort to explain these absences to Miyo. He cannot tell her the truth — though he is longing to tell it to someone — and does not wish to make up stories. He pays her at least double what she was used to receiving from Father, and her duties now, a little cleaning, a little shopping, are almost non-existent, but each time he slides open the front door he half expects to find her gone, run off with the soy-seller’s son, or taken service in some household where she will not be lonely or bored.

Once a week he fire-watches. When his name appears twice on the weekly roster, he simply ignores the second duty. Being afraid of Saburo is a habit he has fallen out of, quite suddenly, a luxury he no longer has the time for. When he does take his turn, he naps in the sewing room whenever it suits him, and on one of these twenty-minute sleeps, curled on the bedding with his overcoat pulled tightly about him, he dreams he has been left alone to care for the child. He is carrying him through Asakusa to the Montparnasse cinema. Ishihara is in there, and also — though Yuji only sees him from behind, the collar patches on his uniform, the shaved grey hair above the thickset neck — General Sugiyama. It’s a Chaplin film, The Orphan. The general laughs uproariously. Ishihara twists in his seat. ‘The future,’ he says, blowing smoke into Yuji’s face.

When Yuji leaves the cinema, Emile is so small he has to hold him in the palm of his hand like a frog. He goes into a restaurant, asks for a cup to put the child in. He is no bigger than a beetle now. A gang of soldiers arrives. They invite Yuji to drink with them. One, with movements both playful and threatening, makes a present of his bayonet. When they leave, Yuji looks for the cup, but there are cups everywhere, scores of them, spread over every table, all of them empty. He searches, his heart wrung by a terror not even the fire-dreams provoked. He has lost Emile! He has lost his son! (And what can he possibly tell Alissa?) There is an instant of deranged clarity in which, alone in the nightmare restaurant, he realises he must kill himself . . then he comes to, making some grief-noise in his throat, and staggers onto the platform, gulps mouthfuls of cold dawn air until he comes to his senses, but the dream stays with him for days. Even when he holds Emile, feels the packed robustness of his body, he cannot quite pick out a last splinter of anxiety.

A telegram from Feneon. He is in Shanghai. He is well. He sends an embrace to his grandson. When Alissa shows it to Yuji, he reads it and passes it back without comment. She folds it, makes it small, then tucks it away in a pocket of the cardigan she is wearing. They look at the baby, play with the baby. When anything is in doubt, when the world threatens to force an entry, it is Emile they turn to, the power he has to root them in the present. His skin now has lost its look of long immersion and become smooth as a petal. The stump of umbilical cord that blackened and stank for a while has been shed to leave behind a clean, neat wound of separation. They lie him on the sofa, on the rug, on the bed. They examine him as though the human body was entirely new to them, their private discovery. One game, which entertains them for entire evenings, is to parcel out his features, divide them between Feneons and Takanos, between Orient and Occident. His eyes, in shape, are clearly Japanese, but their colour, hazel with gleams of new copper, comes from somewhere else. His mouth, his hands, the crown of his hair are, they agree, from the East. His nose, his feet, his skin tone, from the West. Yuji claims the child’s back, Alissa his ears, particularly the lobes. It is only during the third or fourth time they play the game that Yuji realises Alissa is hoping to assemble, from the unnattributed fragments, a picture of Suzette. As for the fear, the unvoiced fear of the child being lame, there is nothing visible, nothing in the vigour with which he writhes his limbs, to suggest any cruel inheritance. He is, in his way, perfect.

They cook for each other, eat with gusto even the most unpromising results. They read aloud from what is left of Feneon’s library: Turgenev, Chekhov, the stories of Maupassant. When they have finished the wine Yuji asks Mr Fujitomi where he can buy more, and is given the address of a house in Koshikawa, the mansion of some junior branch of a zaibatsu family where a servant, a retired sumo, leads Yuji down to a cellar lined with a thousand dusty green ends of bottles.

Fujitomi is the first person Yuji tells about Emile. They have spent half a day moving the contents of a failed shoe emporium from one end of the Low City to the other. Men’s shoes, women’s shoes, working boots, high fashion. Yuji picks out a pair of fleece-lined women’s boots.

‘You’ve someone in mind for those?’ asks Fujitomi. ‘I don’t think they’ll be missed.’

‘There’s a girl,’ says Yuji, quietly.

‘Pretty?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good for you.’

‘A foreigner.’

‘So your tastes run that way, do they?’

‘I’ve known her a long time.’

‘You’ll know the size of her feet, then.’

‘Yes.’

‘Good for you.’

‘We have a child.’

Silence. A beat of two. A beat of three.

‘A child?’

‘A baby boy.’

‘You’re kidding, right?’

‘No.’

Fujitomi puts down the armful of rubber toilet slippers he is carrying, puffs out his cheeks, smoothes, with both hands, the skin of his scalp. ‘A little boy?’

‘Emile.’

‘Em . .?’

‘Emile. It’s a French name.’

‘French . . You certainly know how to throw a surprise.’

‘He was born before the New Year.’

‘A Dragon boy?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the hour?’

‘Ox, I think.’

‘Highly auspicious.’

They laugh together.

‘A little unofficial boy,’ says Fujitomi, a sudden fleeting melancholy in his expression. ‘A little international boy, well, well . . Who else knows about this? Your father?’

Yuji shakes his head.

‘You better start thinking what you’re going to say. You won’t be able to keep something like this quiet for long.’

‘I know.’

‘And the girl, the one who’s going to be walking around in fleece-lined boots, what about her?’

‘She will leave.’

‘Leave?’

‘Japan.’

‘With the kid? Em . .?’

‘Emile. Yes.’

‘Where will they go?’ He holds up a hand. ‘No. Don’t answer that. It’s none of my business.’ He grimaces. ‘If you’re asking for advice. .’

‘I’m not asking for advice,’ says Yuji. ‘I know there’s nothing anyone can do.’

‘Do? Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ says Fujitomi, rummaging for a box. He finds one and packs the boots carefully inside. ‘I hope she likes them,’ he says. It is difficult to read the message in his eyes. Perhaps it is just difficult to take it seriously.

13

On 22 February a telegram arrives from Hong Kong. It is as brief, as portentous, as the one that preceded it. The same day, in Hongo, there is a letter for Yuji from Father. They have been snowed in for more than two weeks, though now a thaw will allow him to reach the store on the road below the farm where mail is accepted and sent on to the city. Mother has caught a chill but seems otherwise to find the mountain beneficial. On three occasions she has joined the family for the midday meal. As for himself, he has become quite the rustic, cutting wood, clearing snow off the roof, feeding the hens (those the foxes have not yet caught). What is Yuji’s opinion of the situation in Setagaya? What are the doctors saying? He will, as soon as the weather permits, take the train to Tokyo.

Two days after the telegram and the letter, Emile develops a fever. One moment he is lying placidly in Alissa’s lap, the next his limbs are rigid. He blinks, woken by some event deep in his body, then fires from his mouth a stream of creamy vomit. When it stops he howls. Alissa rocks him, gives him the breast his hands and mouth are fumbling for. Yuji cleans the vomit from the sofa, from the rug. Splashes of it have reached even the wall behind the table. He has just finished, is carrying the bucket back to the kitchen, when the baby, rolling his head from the nipple, is convulsed a second time.

What is an infant’s grip on life? How tenacious? Can it slip away in an hour while his parents hover over him, ignorant and terrified?

A third attack, a fourth.

‘There’s a woman,’ says Alissa, ‘opposite the fan shop at the end of the street. She has children of her own. I know she sometimes looks after others . .’

Her name is Kiyama. She follows Yuji through the evening blue of the snow. She asks no questions. She has not even taken off her apron. She comes into the house, bows to Alissa, and kneels on the floor. The child, panting on his mother’s lap, lets the stranger handle him. She unpins his nappy and sniffs at it, gently palps the distended belly, looks over his skin for signs of something she evidently does not find.

‘What a ni-ice little baby,’ says the woman, sounding like a collector pleased to have found an unusual specimen so close to home.

‘Is it serious?’ asks Alissa. ‘Should we call a doctor? Every time he’s sick his whole body shakes . .’

‘You really speak Japanese!’ says the woman, laughing and showing off her tobacco-stained teeth. ‘How clever you must be. Don’t worry about baby. Keep giving him your milk. You have a lot of milk?’

‘I think so.’

‘Keep him close to you, against your skin, like a little husband.’ She laughs again and looks at Yuji. ‘You have to sleep somewhere else tonight. Mother doesn’t have strength for you too.’

As he thanks her at the door, he digs a five-yen note from his pocket. ‘It’s too much,’ says the woman decisively. He takes out some change. In the end she accepts one yen and fifty sen, tucking the coins beneath her apron.

The vomiting continues but the intervals between each attack grow longer. Eventually, a few minutes before eleven, it stops. Alissa and the child sleep on the sofa, a single creature again as if Saramago’s scissors had never put them apart. Yuji brings them a blanket from the spare room, then goes to the kitchen, rinses the cloths and hangs them to dry. Back in the salon, he puts wood into the stove, lets a little of the fragrant smoke spill out to cover the smell of sickness, yawns until he shudders, and sleeps in the armchair opposite the sofa, waking, moments later it seems, in a room packed with light, Alissa and Emile playing together on the floor. All sense of crisis has fled with the night. When he stirs, she looks at him, her face fresh as the morning.

‘I’m going to cut your hair,’ she says, grinning. ‘It’s starting to stick out over your ears. People will make comments.’

He goes out for food. The sun, already high, glints on melting ice and snow. He buys croquettes from the stand by the university, then, out of sheer good spirits, stays to talk with the vendor. Is business better in the cold weather?

‘Better for the pocket,’ says the man, ‘but worse for the feet.’

‘We were up all night with our son,’ says Yuji. ‘He gave us quite a fright, but this morning he’s well.’

‘That’s how they are,’ says the man. ‘Your first?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ll get used to it,’ he says. ‘I’ve got five.’ He gives Yuji an extra croquette, for free. ‘Nothing like a croquette for keeping up your strength,’ he says.

At the house, the bag of steaming food and two cups of mugi-cha make an instant party. The child who seemed so sick is now entirely restored. They look at him, wonderingly, and recount to each other the incidents of the night before, the vomiting, the visit, their own alarm, as a kind of comedy. How odd the woman was! And how absurd she should be so surprised by Alissa speaking Japanese! (‘She must have seen me on the street for years.’) Wiping the grease of the food from her fingers, she sits at the piano, plays Mozart, Bach, Debussy. Last of all she plays the Chopin.

‘You remember it?’ she asks.

He nods. The room is briefly filled with ghosts. She lowers the lid over the piano keys. After a while she says, ‘Let’s go outside.’

In the garden, they walk slow circles round the magnolia tree, Alissa in her fleece-lined boots, Emile with his red wool bonnet on, a Christmas present from Rose or Sandrine, or perhaps Natasha. Needing one hand for her stick, she holds the baby in the curve of the other arm, and when the arm is tired she passes him to Yuji.

‘Wouldn’t it be nice,’ she says, as motes of snow, the first of a fresh fall, dance around them, ‘if he could remember this.’

‘The garden?’ asks Yuji.

‘And us,’ she says. ‘All together.’

Inside again, they read, doze, eat. In the warmth of the salon they are starting to have the intimacy of stabled animals. Dusk falls. From the street comes the scrape, scrape of someone shovelling snow. A woman calls her children in.

Alissa takes a bath. ‘Do you want my water?’ she asks, leaning, pink-faced, into the salon. So he lies in her water. The bath is enamelled iron, forged, perhaps — the scale is suggestive — by the same foundry that made the stove. He has not been in a bath like this before. His toes are on a level with his nose. The hardware of the taps has a nautical gleam, industrial, but if this is a good example of a foreign bath, then the foreigners have not quite understood. How reassuring that is! A weakness at last. He lies with his head on the cushion of curled iron. The water smells of roses. A bulb behind a half-globe of white glass burns unevenly, and below, over a wooden rack, a pair of stockings is hanging next to three squares of drying cotton, the baby’s nappies.

‘There are towels in the cupboard,’ she calls through the door. ‘And I put out one of Papa’s old robes. It’s a bit moth-eaten . .’

He comes back into the salon wearing the robe. It’s maroon and gold silk, the sort of garment he imagines an African princeling wearing, perhaps in a place like Harar. There are indeed moth-holes in it.

‘Very nice,’ she says, looking as if she might start to laugh.

‘Is he feeding still?’

‘No,’ she says, glancing at the baby’s head. ‘He’s asleep. Can you help me move him?’

Kneeling by her feet (roses, roses . .), he takes the child’s weight as she rolls him from her breast, then lifts him to the end of the sofa and lies him there. Though still asleep, the child pushes out his lips in some infant reflex of suckling.

‘It must be good milk,’ says Yuji. ‘He even dreams of it.’

‘I put a drop on my finger,’ she says. ‘I wanted to see what it tasted like.’

‘And?’

‘A little bit sweet. Would you like to try some?’

‘Wouldn’t I be stealing it from him?’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ she says. ‘Even when he feeds half the night I wake up with my breasts so full they ache. See how swollen they are even now?’

When his lips close round one of her nipples it stiffens against his tongue. He sucks but cannot at first make the milk come. He has forgotten how to. She touches his hair and with her other hand gently squeezes the base of her breast. ‘There,’ she says. ‘Is it coming now?’

He slides his arms round her waist. His mind darkens with the old bliss. The milk comes surprisingly fast, warm as the skin it flows through and, as she told him, slightly sweet. He keeps some of it in his mouth, then lifts his head from her breast and lets the milk slide from his mouth into hers. She tenses, shivers, then bites his lip, nips it hard enough to bring a little blood away, just beside where her father cut him with his ring. He dabs it with his hand. ‘Sorry,’ she says, smiling and pushing a finger through one of the moth-holes in his gown. ‘What a mess we’re making of your beautiful face.’

For a week of winter nights, the child in a crib at the end of the bed, they are cautious lovers. She has, she confides, not quite recovered from the birth. She does not give him details. He is grateful. She leads him into other ways, things she heard about perhaps during her confinement at the Bullseye Piano Academy, those idle hours in the company of Miss Ogilvy’s girls. When the baby wakes, they roll apart. For Yuji, there is something fascinating, something faintly unnerving, in the way she can, inside a few seconds, change the use, the aim of her body. One moment arched and hurrying after her pleasure, the next bent over the child, a mother entirely. And when the baby is soothed, she climbs up the bed with her appetite intact, as if all of it, nursing and lovemaking, were one continuous thought, one line of the brush.

Tokyo, 3 March: the Festival of Dolls. They dress up but go nowhere. Baby Emile has his arms threaded through the sleeves of his Chinese jacket. Alissa wears the rose kimono with the dark blue obi. Yuji, after much teasing, much prompting, also puts on a kimono, one of Father’s, which he carries from the house in Hongo under the bemused gaze of Miyo. It is the first time he has worn a kimono since middle school, and looking at himself in the bathroom mirror at Kanda (with the pretty tiles all around it, silhouettes of courting couples in frocks and frock coats), he sees Father as a young man, clean-shaven and scowling. Sees Mother as a young man? But more than this — and beyond the fleeting irritation of realising that a person does not grow away from his parents but towards them — he sees a figure as Japanese as the Sumida river. This is the creature Feneon baulked at (‘You . . ?). The native Japanese out of his borrowed fashion and dressed again as he was intended. An exotic to them. A little exotic even to himself. He tugs at the obi, tugs at the heavy grey collar. He is not even sure he is wearing it correctly, that he has done everything he should, and yet, as he straightens his back and softens his shoulders, it begins to belong on him. He tries out a half-dozen different faces, turns left and right in front of the glass. It strikes him that he might make a passable actor. Then, less comfortably, comes the thought that he might, if he is not careful, end up as nothing, a being with no convincing identity at all, a stranger among strangers.

Alissa cooks the chicken Yuji paid excessively for at the butcher’s in Shitaya. A scrawny carcass but fresh. They roast it, eat it with bowls of rice, a salad of grated cabbage. They drink wine, more than usual. Alissa teaches Yuji, thigh to thigh on the piano stool, the first two bars of the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, then, singing her own accompaniment, shows him one of the dances she learnt at Mrs Yamaguchi’s.

‘You’ll tire yourself out,’ he says.

‘What does that matter?’ she asks, a sudden sharpness to her voice he does not respond to, that he pretends not to understand.

The moment passes but the day ends with a confused exchange of glances. She wants him to comfort her. He doesn’t know how. In the morning he works with Fujitomi. There has been no snow for a week, and on the verges of some of the roads they pass in the blue van the flowers of the plum blossom show themselves tenderly against the darker world behind.

After lunch he goes back to Kanda. Alissa, her hair tied up in a cloth, is scrubbing the wooden boards of the hall. Yuji helps her to stand. Briefly, she rests her head against his chest, then sends him through to the salon where Emile is in a makeshift cradle of cushions on the sofa. Laboriously, the baby focuses on Yuji’s face, frowns to find it is not the face he expects, but does not cry.

‘I’ll take him into the garden,’ calls Yuji.

‘Be sure to wrap him warmly,’ she calls back.

In the garden, he walks on the newly uncovered grass, alone with his son. For now, out here, on what might be the first true day of spring, there is not, it seems, a single troubled thought in that small, fragrant head. Rested, fed, cleaned, the child is between appetites, and lies with his cheek against Yuji’s arm, one hand drowsily fingering the air. What is he looking at? The pattern of the branches? A tail of cloud? Yuji talks to him. It is strange the things one says to an infant, the confidences, the declarations one drops into the wide, brown stare of such a child. How long will it last, that gaze unadorned as a dog’s? Another year? Less than that? What will this face be in two or three years? What will he sound like? How will he laugh?

He is absorbed in this walking, this questioning, this careful circling of the tree, when he hears the doorbell. He has been expecting it, of course, privately counting off the days, so when he comes in to find Alissa in the salon, the unfolded telegram in her hand, his first emotion is relief. He waits, watching her, his fingers softly tapping a heartbeat on the baby’s back.

‘Papa,’ she says.

‘Yes.’

‘He’s there. He’s found a house.’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s sent for me.’

The baby stretches, grows impatient in Yuji’s arms.

‘I am to go to Miss Ogilvy’s. She is arranging everything.’

‘Miss Ogilvy?’

‘Yes. The tickets. A ship.’

‘When?’

‘Soon.’ The word barely audible. After a moment, and very gently, she takes the baby from him and steps back.

‘Will you come to Yokohama with us?’

‘Of course.’

‘Papa says you should look after the keys.’

‘Keys?’

‘To the house.’

He nods. ‘If I have to leave, I’ll give them to Fujitomi.’

‘Thank you.’

‘And my uncle’s address. I’ll give you my uncle’s address. The farm.’

‘Yes.’ She brushes her lips on the baby’s head. ‘It’s been nice, though, hasn’t it?’

He has hoped for another week, perhaps even two, but does not get them. After three days they are on the train to Yokohama, a pair of suitcases, far too big for the luggage rack, on the floor by their knees.

At the academy, their ringing is answered by Miss Ogilvy in person. They drag the cases inside. In the billiard room, the table is covered with a dust sheet and all the chairs have been herded to the corners of the room. The walls are bare. The women have been taken down, put away somewhere, but it is not until the household is all together in the dining room that Yuji finally understands that the academy is finished with. Miss Ogilvy and at least three of her girls will be going with Alissa to Singapore. The rest, presumably, will be taking other ships to other destinations. No one is staying.

‘I have written to the President,’ says Miss Ogilvy, helping herself to a crab’s claw from one of the little boxes sent up from China Town. ‘I have offered this house as a headquarters for the army of occupation.’

‘The President?’ asks Yuji, to whom these remarks seem to have been addressed.

‘Of the United States,’ says Miss Ogilvy. ‘I seriously expect him to accept the offer.’ She fixes him with the kind of penetrating stare her narrow face is peculiarly suited to producing. ‘Unless,’ she says, ‘you think Japan will win the war.’

‘What war?’ asks Yuji, flummoxed. ‘A war with the United States?’

She is sucking the meat from the claw. She nods.

‘The imperial navy,’ says Natasha, ‘can’t wait more than a few months. They won’t have any oil left.’

‘We were told that by an admiral,’ says Sandrine. ‘So we know what we’re talking about.’

‘You should learn English,’ says Rose. ‘When the Americans come, you can do business with them. Then Emile will have a rich daddy.’

An hour later, without a word to Yuji or any sign at all of what in these last days has been between them, Alissa goes up to bed with Emile. The others sit on at the table playing cards and drinking. One by one they drift off.

‘Now you,’ says Miss Ogilvy, when it’s just her and Yuji left. ‘There won’t be much time in the morning. Go up and tell her how it will all be all right. Tell her you will see her again, that you will find a way. Tell her anything you think you can get her to believe.’

‘I would go if I could,’ says Yuji, quietly, furiously. ‘Is it my fault things are like this?’

‘In part,’ says Miss Ogilvy. ‘Though not entirely.’

In the bedroom, Alissa does not answer his whispered enquiry. She is lying with the baby’s head tucked beneath her chin. He sits on the bed behind them, listening to the mingled rhythms of their breathing. Eventually he lies down. He does not undress or get under the covers. He has, he decides, already lost his briefly held right to such familiarity. Tomorrow — a few hours from now — they will separate, and it will not be for weeks or months but for years. It may, indeed, be for ever. That, in his heart, in the silence of his heart, is what he thinks it will be. For ever. The world will reach out for them, take them, hide them from each other. They will write at first, but soon it will not be safe to receive letters from Singapore because it will not be the postman who delivers them but the Tokko. And if she leaves Singapore? How will he ever know where they have gone? You can lose someone in Tokyo. What chance of finding a woman and a half-Japanese child in a world in ruins?

The cars are ordered for eleven o’clock. As the hour approaches, the girls hang round each other’s necks, grow sentimental, rain kisses on Emile, his cheeks, his hands, his perfect feet. Yuji, the only man there, the only Japanese, waits on his own by the empty fireplace. At a quarter to the hour, Alissa, Emile in her arms, crosses the room and stands in front of him. She smiles. The smile tells him she too believes this is the last time they will see each other. It also tells him that this is a truth neither of them, as a matter of good style, of etiquette, of something else, perhaps, something more, will, even in these last minutes, hint at to each other. He has offered to go to the docks with her. The offer has been declined, firmly. The docks are full of police spies. It would be a quite unnecessary risk. And like her father (whose example she is clearly taking strength from), she does not like goodbyes to be drawn-out affairs.

‘How happy he will be to see you,’ says Yuji.

‘Yes.’

‘And Emile.’

‘Yes.’

‘Perhaps you will like Singapore.’

‘The English are dull,’ she says.

‘Dull?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve only met a few.’

‘Do you think he will learn to speak English there?’

‘Papa?’

‘Emile.’

‘Yes. I suppose he might.’

There’s a movement at the window. ‘Coats on, girls!’ calls Miss Ogilvy. ‘The cars are here.’

‘They’re early,’ says Yuji.

‘And Japanese,’ says Alissa, hurriedly. ‘I’ll see to that. And I’ll tell him everything about you. I’ll make him proud.’

The drivers come in. The smaller of the two turns down the corners of his mouth at the sight of so much luggage.

‘I should help,’ says Yuji.

‘You stay with your family,’ says Miss Ogilvy. And he stays, dumbly watching the bags being carried out, and now and then turning to meet Alissa’s gaze. The timing is very delicate. He can, he thinks, do this for another minute or two. Five at most, no more. The last bag is collected, lashed precariously to the roof of a car.

Miss Ogilvy comes in, buttoning her coat. She looks slowly around the room, takes a large bunch of keys from her pocket. ‘Are you ready?’ she asks. They follow her out. Yuji carries Emile. When Alissa has sat herself in the back of the second car, when she has slid her stick beside her right leg, he leans down, and a little awkwardly, passes her the baby.

14

Forty-eight hours after the ship has sailed Yuji opens his eyes in a room he cannot remember having seen before. To the right, the direction he is facing, daylight seeps through a window of torn paper to show a pair of muslin sitting cushions, an old utility chest, a low table scattered with flasks and cups. He is not alone. From behind him comes the moist, arrhythmic rasp of snoring. He twists in the bedding, squints. A man is lying half a mat away. A large head, a pile of lank hair, an overcoat for a blanket. One arm is visible, one wrist. On the wrist is Yuji’s watch. Yuji shuts his eyes, sleeps again. The next time he wakes there is a woman standing above him, prodding him with her foot.

‘If you want to stay,’ she says, ‘you’ll have to settle your bill first.’

He sits up, rubs his face, looks around.

‘Your friend left an hour ago. Said you’d pay his share.’

He nods. He cannot speak yet. He is longing for some water.

‘Quite a party you had,’ says the woman, seeming, for the moment, to take pity on him. ‘You must be joining up, eh?’

He nods again.

‘You want some tea? I’ll make you tea, but don’t try to run off without paying. People who do that round here end up in the water.’

Round here? Round where?

She leaves, draws the door shut. Yuji, finding he is already fully dressed, shuffles on his knees to the window, forces it wide, and looks out over the smoking, crooked back lanes of China Town. A breeze carries smells of boiling, of frying, of bar latrines. He belches acid, wonders for a moment if he is going to faint.

‘You’ve got it bad,’ says the woman, coming in with his tea. ‘Army life won’t be as hard as all that. Just think how proud your mama will be. And the girls, they don’t look twice at a man unless he’s got a uniform on.’

She puts the bill under his cup. He finds, crumpled in different pockets, the money he needs. She counts it, counts the tip, raises the little plucked crescents of her eyebrows, and bows to him. ‘They’ll probably make you an officer,’ she says. ‘With your nice manners.’

The house is a bar with rooms, a low-grade assignation house. Downstairs, a girl is wiping a dirty cloth over a dirty table. Yuji mutters his goodbyes, trips over a hen at the door, gets out. He hopes he will not meet his ‘friend’ again, the self-professed artist who, at some hour in some bar the previous day (the New Moon? The Red Sleeve?) attached himself to Yuji, listened to his story, and later, presumably to compensate himself for attending so respectfully to the troubles of a drunken stranger, decided to steal Yuji’s watch and hat.

He takes the first train for Tokyo, reads, with hallucinatory attention, a woman’s magazine left behind on the seat (‘Why Mother-in-law Is Always Right’), then spends his last few sen on a tram from Tokyo Central to Hongo. In the vestibule, while he is shaking off his boots, Miyo appears.

‘How fortunate!’ she says, a delighted smile on her face. ‘He only arrived an hour ago. Or two hours. But anyway, he was here when the man with the big car came. I wouldn’t have known what to say. Have you lost your hat?’

He goes past her into the Western room. The screens to the Japanese room are open. Father is in there, kneeling by the alcove, carefully wrapping incense burners in sheets of tissue paper.

‘Ah,’ he says, catching sight of Yuji. ‘Miyo didn’t seem to know when you would be back.’

‘Welcome home,’ says Yuji. ‘Please accept my apologies. I was not expecting you.’

‘I telephoned two nights ago.’

‘You did?’

‘It doesn’t matter. You’re here now.’

‘Are you well?’

‘Thank you. Yes.’

‘And Mother?’

‘Surprisingly well. The parcel on the table is a gift from her. Cinnamon biscuits. Easter biscuits. A recipe of old Yakumo’s.’

‘Mother has been baking?’

‘I should have taken her long ago. If I had realised how it would benefit her . .’

Yuji looks at the parcel, touches it. He feels as though sake is seeping in a gum from his eyes, that he could, at any instant, become hysterical. He also feels quite calm. He picks up the envelope beside the parcel.

‘A young man in a theatrical uniform delivered it,’ says Father. ‘If you had been here a little sooner, you would have met him.’

‘There was a big car?’

‘Apparently. Miyo saw it.’

‘I think I have met him already.’

‘A highly unpleasant type.’

‘Yes. Shall I help you to wrap those?’

‘I’ve nearly finished.’

Inside the envelope is an ivory card, a crest of some sort at the top, and below, in expensively printed calligraphy, an invitation to a private viewing of the Unit’s inaugural film, Blood and Silence, to be shown at 3 p.m. the following Friday at the residence of Mr Kaoru Ishihara.

‘I shall be going to Setagaya this evening,’ says Father. ‘When I spoke to Sonoko, she was not particularly encouraging.’

‘No,’ says Yuji. It is two weeks since he visited Grandfather. Did Sonoko mention that too?

‘You’ll be able to come, I hope?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then,’ says Father, pushing himself to his feet, ‘perhaps you might want to shave before we leave. And a fresh shirt . .?’

It’s dusk when they set out, father and son, their gait almost indistinguishable as they pass the dark or softly lit houses of the street that for so many years has been their home. To the west, small flocks of birds flit across the sky. To the east, the moon is rising out of a chimney in Honjo.

‘Have you had much trouble with Saburo?’ asks Father.

‘Not really,’ says Yuji. ‘Perhaps our mistake was to take him too seriously.’

‘Your efforts at the bathhouse should keep him quiet for a while. I must congratulate you. I have already heard the story from Mrs Itaki and old Kawabata. It seems you saved the keeper’s wife.’

‘There were several of us,’ says Yuji. ‘And we could not save Watanabe.’

‘A pity.’

‘Yes.’

‘Even so, you behaved correctly.’

‘Dr Kushida says I’m ready for the army now.’

‘I shall be seeing him tomorrow, or the next day.’

‘I wonder,’ says Yuji, ‘if there is any point delaying the inevitable.’

‘It will be hard to avoid it altogether,’ says Father, ‘but there is no need to embrace it before it becomes necessary.’

‘I am hardly embracing it.’

‘No,’ says father, glancing across at him. ‘Naturally.’

At the house in Setagaya, Sonoko, more nurse now than housekeeper, leads them to the little ‘winter’ room at the side of the house, where Grandfather is sitting beside a kotatsu. He looks up at his visitors, looks from one to the other. For a second Yuji is afraid he does not recognise them. Then he nods, croaks a welcome. Sonoko puts down sitting cushions. Would they like tea, or sake, perhaps? They ask for tea.

‘Kensuke and Sawa send their regards,’ says Father. ‘Noriko, too, of course.’ He pauses but there is no reply. Nothing.

‘And Hiroshi has visited. Also Asako and the child.’

It’s hard to say what the old man has heard, what he is attending to. Under the ridge of his grey brows, he seems to be staring inwards at some scene of disarray he cannot now ever turn away from.

‘Hiroshi has finished his training. He will be posted soon. It could be anywhere. They are not informed until the last moment.’

Sonoko brings in the tea. Grandfather immediately turns to her, his eyes full of silent entreaty, as though he hoped she would send away these people who come to him with news of a world he has finished with. Father lights a cigarette. Good cigarettes are not easy to find any more. He draws on it thoughtfully, holds the smoke in his lungs for a second before letting it stream slowly through his nose. Grandfather says something to him. It’s like the noise of a radio between stations, a growl of static in which words are hidden. He does not bother to repeat it. Father looks at Sonoko.

‘He says you have learnt to sit up straight now.’ There is the hint of a smile on her face.

Briefly, Father smiles too. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘The mountain has been a good teacher.’

The supper is invalid food, bland, easily chewed, easily swallowed. Conversation of any kind is so difficult it makes Father sweat. Yuji does not help him. The silence, interrupted only by the tap of the teapot on the lip of a cup, is easier to bear.

At nine thirty Sonoko informs them that it is time for Grandfather to retire. She stands and reaches down for him, slides an arm under his shoulder. ‘Goodnight, Grandfather,’ says Yuji. The old man flutters a hand at him, then turns, lets himself be led from the room, a lame ox led away by the farmer’s wife. Twenty minutes later Sonoko returns.

‘Does he sleep well?’ asks Father.

‘He sleeps,’ she says, ‘but when he wakes he is still tired.’

‘Please inform us,’ says Father, ‘if you need more assistance.’

She thanks him.

In the eight-mat room, the lamp is lit, the bedding pulled from behind the fusuma doors, unrolled.

‘You hardly spoke all evening,’ says Father, taking off his jacket. ‘Are you feeling unwell?’

‘You too,’ says Yuji, ‘must be tired after your journey.’

‘Yes. Travel is tiring.’

‘Do you know how long you will be staying?’

‘A week should be long enough.’

‘Just a week?’

‘With spring coming it’s a busy time on the farm. Hiroshi’s away, and the young fellow who used to help now and then has gone too. The more I can do, the more time Kensuke can spend in the dyeing barn. Even in these times there’s quite a demand for his work . . I’ll visit again in a month or two. Much depends on what happens here. I hope you will keep us fully informed.’

Father takes his towel and leaves for the bathroom. Yuji, over-tired or not yet nearly tired enough, parts the doors of the model room and leans his face inside. The light from the lamp behind him gives the model an eerie, moonlit look. The threads of the satin river gleam. The tin tops of trams and taxis, the wire spars of a bridge, hold sparks, pale smears of light, while the rest, the labyrinth of little streets, the toy buildings with their toy-sized shadows, remain in darkness. (He cannot, for example, see the Bank of Japan.) Was there a moon the night before the earthquake? He doesn’t know, though he must, at Uncle Kensuke’s, have seen a moon rise or not. He tries to remember, to think of the mountain, of himself as a boy on the mountain, but his imagination offers him only what it has offered him all day, a white ship on a sea of living jade, a woman at the rail with a child in her arms.

‘Is it finished?’ asks Father, appearing at Yuji’s shoulder his face smelling of the astringent brown soap Grandfather has long preferred.

‘I don’t know,’ says Yuji. ‘If he can’t work on it any more, I suppose it is.’

‘Don’t you think Sonoko must have been doing most of it? I always thought so.’

Yuji slides the doors shut. He goes to the bathroom. When he returns, Father is in bed, unbuckling his watch.

‘Have you lost yours?’ he asks.

‘It’s at home,’ says Yuji. He puts out the lamp. A night bird calls from the garden. The house settles.

‘Miyo,’ says Father, ‘seemed in her own way to be hinting at something. I imagine she meant me to think you had found a new companion.’

For a moment Yuji is tempted to keep silent, to feign sleep. Then, speaking to the purple air above his head, he says, ‘Yes.’

‘Is it serious?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘That’s good. The other was years ago.’

‘Momoyo.’

‘Yes. Well, no doubt you will tell us about her in your own time. Let us try to sleep now.’

15

The next morning Father stays at Setagaya, while Yuji, inventing some appointment with Fujitomi, returns to Hongo. He calls for Miyo. There is no answer. He goes onto the verandah and looks down the garden — the gingko tree, the garden study, the bamboo, the line of darker earth where he and Miyo dug the trench. It’s a garden that will need taking in hand soon. Spring pruning, spring planting. The house, too, requires attention. There is damp behind the dresser in the Western room, one of the beams on the verandah needs splicing with new wood, some tiles (a result of his climbing on them?) have fallen from the roof. It seems, however, quite obvious to him that none of this will be done, not by him, not, perhaps, by anyone.

He takes a bath, lies there staring at the drops of condensation on the ceiling until the water is as chill as the air. Wasn’t he sincere? Didn’t he do everything that was expected of him? Why, then, this leaden sense of shame, this unsheddable feeling of having, from the very beginning, imagined everything wrongly? No wonder he cannot write poetry! Dragonfly had some of the honesty of childhood in it, but since then, idle in his little sewing room, he has carefully misunderstood himself, made himself as much a ghost as Mother, a footless shade, babbling, ravenous to be thought clever, important, different. A shade who became a father. A father who has given up his son.

He does not spend the day. He moves its hours one by one, an idiot at an abacus. Night comes. It is almost comically threatening. He mutters the child’s name until it sounds like a riddle. In Otaki’s someone is singing. He does not recognise the voice. He lies down, a finger tracing the little ridges of the matting. He is thinking of the writer Akutagawa, his scraps of beautiful work, his misery, his taste for Veronal. (There are old bottles of it downstairs in Mother’s room. She always had much more than she needed.) The thought is comforting, though slightly ridiculous. He is not Akutagawa. He is not Arthur Rimbaud dying of boredom and swollen veins in the desert. Nor is he Feneon or Uncle Kensuke or Father or Ryuichi. He is not Junzo. He is not Taro, or Professor Komada telling them that Proust slept in a cork-lined room. He is not Proust.

The singing stops. The list continues.

He will, he supposes, by morning, be left with something.

16

What should one wear to an afternoon of blood and silence? Something elegant? Something formal? Something of a military character? He chooses the suit that was his graduation gift from Father (and which Father must have intended him to wear on his first day in some school or office). White shirt, blue tie. He puts the box containing the ruby-headed pin in his jacket pocket, looks round for his watch, remembers, then goes down stairs.

As he steps into the street he sees Kyoko coming out of Itaki’s. They cross beside her gateway.

‘Be careful,’ she says, not looking at him. ‘He wishes to harm you.’

‘He has always wished to harm me,’ says Yuji. ‘Did you not know?’

She goes in through her gate. He keeps walking. He is pleased, however, she has taken the trouble, the risk, however small, to warn him. Pleased that she is, in some way, a friend.

He eats in the Low City, a place by the water, then goes to the Mitsukoshi and buys a new watch, a Seiko, as much like his old watch as he can find. On a different floor in the same store, he buys a hat, plain brown, an austerity hat of the kind that will soberly express, in queues for the tram, queues for rice, meat, bread, sugar, charcoal, his devotion to the subjugation of China.

There is plenty of time. His watch, which the sales girl set for him with careful reference to her own, says ten past two. He flags a taxi outside the store, travels south to Azabu, gets out at the end of Ishihara’s street, and walks, partly screened by the trees, until he is opposite the house. The car is there, bright as a new toy, but there is no sign of any guests, no prefatory commotion. He keeps walking, reaches the other end of the street, then comes slowly back on the same side. This time, as he approaches the house, he hears voices. One of them loud, good-humoured, a voice that knows it will not be contradicted. The other, Ota’s, smooth, carefully subordinate. He stops and edges forward until he can see the flank of a ministry staff car, a uniformed driver at attention beside the open passenger door. He cannot see the men talking. Their voices fade into the garden. The driver drops his stance, swings shut the door of the car, and strolls round to lean against the warmth of the bonnet. For a second time, keeping to the sparse shadows of the trees, Yuji walks past the house. He tells himself he is waiting for a more opportune moment to make his entrance — it would not do to arrive so soon after such an important guest — but as he comes again to the junction with the main road he stands there like a man trying to remember the address of someone he has not visited in years, as if he doubted this clipped, respectful street could possibly be the one he wanted . . .

In his pocket, he touches the box with the pin inside. This, surely, is the moment to put it on, the moment to surrender himself to his protectors. With Ishihara there will be no forced marches in the snow. No beatings from drill instructors. No bayoneting of bound prisoners. He will be part of some troupe, semi-official, decorating the fringes of the regime, breathing, with their productions, a little life into the tiny souls of military planners. There will be cars and money. There will be pink-brown pills to banish sleep. There will be actresses whose age is hard to guess. There will be much excited talking about death, but little actual risk of it. Ishihara, perhaps, is the boy under the shutter he has looked for in so many dreams, the boy who will lift him to safety when the pillars of fire fall and the others are reduced to ashes.

He takes the box from his pocket. He is fiddling with the clasp, freeing it, when a taxi swings into the road from the direction of Roppongi and with a grinding of gears accelerates past him. He looks up, catches a brief clear view of Dick Amazawa, a glimpse of two others on the seat beside him.

Was he seen? Was he recognised? He is sure he was not. Amazawa, though looking out, was looking in, his big face blind to anything beyond the haze of his breath on the window. The time is ten past three. At exactly fourteen minutes past, the taxi returns. Yuji raises an arm, steps out.

‘Shinjuku.’

‘Shinjuku?’

The rear of the cab is blue with cigarette smoke but the smell of Fumi’s perfume, a scent he remembers perfectly from their dance at the Don Juan, lingers in a sticky cloud of sherbet and honey.

They pull onto the main road, turn north. He cannot believe how simple it was (he who has had such trouble stopping taxis!). He twists, stares from the rear window at diminishing Azabu, holds his breath. It is not, of course, too late to tap the driver’s shoulder, say he has forgotten something, has changed his mind. Apologise to Ota at the door, a low bow to Ishihara who will graciously excuse him, link arms and lead him over to the general. It is not too late, it is not too late . . And then, plainly, it is. He breathes out, sits back, picks at the brown band of his new hat, and does not hear, until it is repeated for the third time, the driver’s question.

‘Whereabouts?’

In the days of Grandfather’s youth, Shinjuku was little more than a way station on the road to the province of Kai, a place to find a bed for the night on visits to the city. Now, a short drive north from Azabu, it’s modern Tokyo, its crowds as dense as any in Asakusa or the Ginza. He pays off the taxi outside the Hamada Cinema. There’s a Mikio Naruse film playing.

‘It’s been on for twenty minutes,’ say the girl with the tickets.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ says Yuji, who’s seen it before, twice.

The auditorium is almost empty. The film is melancholy, charming, restful. When he comes out — still on the steps of the cinema — he hears, above the ringing of trams and the rumble of passing trucks, the early evening chorus of birds.

He buys a skewer of gristly meat at a stall near the station, eats it while sitting on an upturned crate beside the stall (one of three that serve as the stall’s restaurant). At some point he will have to make his way back across the city to Hongo. He will have to think about what he has done today, or undone. What he has broken. But for now he will fill out a little curl of time doing nothing anyone might imagine mattered, an hour that never needs to be accounted for. Who knows he’s here? Who would think of looking for him in Shinjuku? He chooses streets at random, stops under lanterns to listen to an accordion playing or a koto, then moves on, chooses again, this bright alley, this dark street. He wonders if he will find the Polar Bear Club, where Fumi worked, but realises it could have had a dozen different names since then, and would, anyway, have been shut for months by government order. He is becoming uncertain of his bearings, has, perhaps, strayed beyond the quarter’s secret borders, when, turning one more corner, crossing a patch of green, then threading the gate of a little shrine, he finds himself on one of the new avenues, walking on a pavement washed by the light of a department store. The half-dark crowd swim by, brushing softly against each other. Yuji steps into the gutter to make room for a soldier walking with his wife and child, then hesitates, struck by something in the man’s face. He looks back. The soldier has also stopped

‘Excuse me,’ says the soldier, taking off his cap, ‘but were you a customer, perhaps?’

‘A customer?’

‘Maybe I fixed your bicycle?’

It takes a moment more, then Yuji suddenly recognises the little mechanic from the repair shop in Hibiya. ‘So you’re in the army now?’

‘I trained in ’37. I was surprised they left me alone as long as they did.’

‘You’ve closed the shop?’

‘I tried to find someone to run it while I was away but it’s specialist work. My wife and the baby are going to live with my mother in Shiba.’

The woman is standing just behind the mechanic’s shoulder, a child about a year old tied to her back in a shawl. She is much younger than her husband. She looks tired and slightly frightened.

‘I’m sure your customers will not forget you,’ says Yuji.

‘Half of them are overseas themselves,’ says the man. ‘When I come home it’ll be like starting again.’

‘I used to do some work for Mr Horikawa,’ says Yuji. ‘He had an office above your workshop.’

‘Of course. Every day he would look in and greet us. Nobody in the street had a bad word to say about him.’

‘He’s gone somewhere?’

‘Gone?’

‘Moved?’

‘He’s dead,’ says the man.

‘Horikawa?’

‘It was even in the paper. I cut it out. If we were in the shop, I could find it for you. Popular Hibaya businessman in railway suicide. Something like that.’

‘Horikawa?’

‘With his son. The one who was a bit, you know, in the head . .’

‘Both of them? Both dead?’

‘They went on to the line just the other side of the steel bridge. Waited there for the night train. It was a big funeral. Even the service of the forty-ninth day had a good turn-out. Or so I heard.’

The child, catching at her mother’s hair, begins to whimper. The woman ignores it.

‘When did it happen?’ asks Yuji.

‘The beginning of October? People say his heart was getting worse. That he was afraid of what would happen to his son if he couldn’t care for him any more. His wife . .’ He sucks in his cheeks.

‘Yes,’ says Yuji.

‘I’m sorry to be the one who brings bad news.’

‘You weren’t to know.’

‘He’s in the cemetery at Koishikawa if you want to pay your respects.’

‘At Koishikawa?‘

‘They had a family plot.’

‘Yes. I see. Thank you.’

‘And if your bicycle needs fixing in, say, six months from now, maybe I’ll be back in business.’

‘I’ll remember,’ says Yuji. They nod to each other, continue on their way, the child’s crying sounding in Yuji’s head long after he could possibly still be hearing it.

17

On the front door of the house in Kanda someone has nailed a large sheet of paper. On it is written (in calligraphy a child would be ashamed of) ABOLISH DESIRE UNTIL THE FINAL VICTORY!

For a few moments Yuji stands there with his bicycle, unsure what to do. Pass by? Pull it off? He cannot use the entrance through the garden. The kitchen door is bolted. And anyway, how would it help him now? It is too late for hiding. He leans his bicycle against the wall of the house. The sense of being observed from the buildings across the street is very strong. He takes the key from his pocket. As he opens the front door the paper flaps, shows, on its other side, an advertisement for tinned whale meat.

He stands in the blackness of the hallway, holds his breath, listens, then hurries through to the salon, opens the window and unlatches the shutters. Brilliant morning light cuts across the room.

He looks in the study, then all the rooms at the back of the house. All of it is secure, undisturbed, exactly as he and Alissa left it nine days ago (nine days!). Whoever nailed up the poster has not yet dared go any further than the door. Some neighbourhood patriot. Someone who imagines he has seen the enemy in his own street. Or was the poster discussed at a meeting of the local association? A warning, a punishment. Do they know his name? Where is Hanako now? Who does she talk to?

He goes upstairs, examines each room in turn until he comes to Alissa’s. The curtains are part open (that, too, just as they left it). He sits on the stripped bed, then steps to the wardrobe and opens both its doors. Though she took all she could fit in the suitcases, pressed in, irritably, more and more, took most of her favourites, there are still eight or ten dresses hanging there, and in the rack of shelves beside the rail, blouses, shirts, rolled socks, camisoles. He touches the dresses, lets his fingers drift from one to the next. Most he cannot remember ever having seen her wear. Most smell only of the little embroidered pillows of lavender at the bottom of the wardrobe (La vraie lavande de Provence). A scarf — chiffon? — is steeped in some perfume of hers but this is not what he is looking for. He shuts the wardrobe, turns the little brass key. In the corner, in the space between the wardrobe and the wall, is a basket of plaited bamboo. He takes off the lid. It is a laundry basket, and crumpled at the bottom, overlooked or ignored, is one of her linen nightgowns. He lifts it out. It smells of her. It smells shockingly of the child. On the front are two small stains, creamy-yellow against the white, where her milk seeped from her, before or after a feed. He holds it up, examines it thoroughly, then takes off his clothes and pulls the gown over his head. It is tight across his upper back and shoulders but otherwise fits him quite comfortably. He curls on the bed, the rough ticking of the mattress. The room, the shadow light, hold him patiently. After an hour he gets up again, takes off the gown, puts on his clothes, goes downstairs, closes the shutter, re-crosses the salon, the dark hall, and leaves the house.

From Kanda he rides towards home, but when he reaches the main road above Yushima he turns left towards the cemetery. The guardian, an old man carrying a broom of bound twigs, guides Yuji to the Horikawa family plot. There are flowers there, white chrysanthemums, but they are not recent, their petals edged with brown, like rust. Behind the grave are wooden sotoba boards with Horikawa’s Buddhist name and that of his son, who, in death, is named Righteous Serene Sincerity Boy. At the front, to the right of the grave, is a small box for business cards, the corner of a last card protruding a little from the slot.

Yuji has brought no flowers or incense with him. The guardian would probably have sold him some but the guardian has wandered away to where his presence is just the faint scratching of twigs on the path.

‘I would have valued your advice,’ says Yuji to the stone. ‘You would have made me coffee on your spirit burner. We would have watched the trains and you would have told me what to do.’ He bows, deeply, straightens his back, then leans down for the edge of card, the little white tongue poking from the box. ‘With condolences, Yoichi Masuda, assistant to the vice president, West Japan Shipping Corp., Akita, Niigata, Hiroshima, Shiminoseki.’ The address of Masuda’s office is in Tokyo, the other side of Hibiya Park from Horikawa’s. Yuji returns to the gate. He cannot hear the guardian’s broom anymore, nor does there seem to be anyone else visiting the cemetery today, unless the two men standing under the cedar tree between the gate and the road are intending to go in. They have, however, nothing in their hands, and there is something slightly odd in the way the younger of the two glances at Yuji, then stares at the other man, in silence.

18

On the day of Father’s departure they travel to the station by taxi, arriving there a few minutes after eleven. They have agreed to have coffee somewhere, a last conversation before the midday train renews their separation. ‘There’s a place across here,’ says Yuji. ‘It won’t be as busy as the station.’

They cross the road, each of them carrying a suitcase. The café has not altered since Yuji was here with Taro. The mural of the temple, the photograph of Hitler and Mussolini, the waitresses in their berets. Even the record they are playing seems to be the same Italian song, in which the only word Yuji recognises is a drawn out ‘amo-re, amo-re’.

They order coffee, are told there is no coffee, not this week, and order tea instead. There are not many other customers. A few couples, a few on their own reading newspapers and smoking.

‘It’s really starting to feel like spring,’ says Father. ‘It’s years since I saw spring on the mountain. Perhaps, after all, you’ll have an opportunity to visit?’

They have already, at home the previous evening, discussed those matters of a practical nature that need to be understood between them. Father and Mother will stay on at the farm for an unspecified period. In the meantime, if Yuji’s red paper arrives (and Father’s visit to Kushida produced no reassurances), then the house in Hongo will be shut down. Miyo will go to Setagaya to help Sonoko. Items of value — the books from the garden study, various old scrolls and lacquerware — can be stored somewhere safe, somewhere fireproof. Somewhere bombproof.

The waitress brings their tea. The clock on the wall behind Father’s head says quarter past the hour.

‘This is the first cold season I can remember,’ says Father, ‘that you have not been ill.’

‘Yes.’

‘It seems that the family is generally in better health these days.’

‘Auntie Sawa?’

‘Certainly no worse.’

Yuji nods. He feels he is carrying a small pistol in his hand which, beneath the table, he is pointing at Father’s belly. He tells himself for the hundredth time that if he could face Feneon, say what he said to Feneon, then he can face Father. But Feneon — however Yuji sometimes chose to think of him — was not his father, whereas the man across the table, the bearded, still vigorous man tipping the ash from his cigarette into the mount Vesuvius ashtray, held him as a baby, taught him as a child, saw all his childish struggling towards the beginning of adulthood. All his subsequent failings.

‘I hope,’ says Father, ‘it’s not a crowded train.’

‘No,’ says Yuji.

‘A crowded compartment, particularly when people are eating, makes the journey much more tiresome.’

‘Perhaps you’ll be fortunate?’

‘Yes, perhaps.’

‘What Miyo hinted at,’ says Yuji, staring into the green depths of his tea, ‘maybe it’s more serious than I admitted.’

‘You’ve admitted nothing,’ says Father. ‘Are you referring to your new friend?’

‘Yes.’

‘She is someone you wish the family to meet?’

‘There are things that need to be explained,’ says Yuji. ‘There are aspects.’

‘Aspects?’

‘She is not Japanese.’

‘A foreigner?’

‘Yes.’

‘I see.’

‘Yes.’

‘I wonder, could she be connected to the Feneons?’

‘You knew?’

‘I am guessing. How many foreigners are you acquainted with?’

‘She is Monsieur Feneon’s daughter.’

‘And she has a name?’

‘Alissa.’

‘Alissa.’

‘Yes.’

‘I assume she lives in her father’s house. Isn’t that by the cathedral?’

Yuji nods. ‘The house is empty now.’

‘Empty?’

‘They have left Japan.’

‘The whole family?’

‘It is only the two of them.’

‘But the father and the daughter?’

‘Yes.’

‘They no longer felt safe here?’

‘How could they?’

‘I understand.’

‘There is something else . .’

‘Yes?’

Yuji draws the photograph from the inside pocket of his jacket. It is one of those Miss Ogilvy made them sit for at Christmas. In the picture, Alissa’s red jacket looks black. Emile is lying with his cheek against her upper arm. Alissa is smiling, shyly. Yuji finds his own expression impossible to read. Part of the fireplace is in view, and the front half of a grey cat. He passes the picture across the table. Father takes out his glasses, glances at his watch, then studies the picture. At last, removing his glasses, folding them, he gives the picture back.

‘When was this taken?’

‘Before the New Year.’

‘Is it . . . this what it seems?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you have waited until now to tell me?’

‘He was born in Yokohama. December the twenty-first. At night.’

‘He?’

‘His name is Emile.’

‘Emile?’

‘Like Zola.’

‘You are telling me you have a son.’

‘Yes.’

Father leans back in his chair. For Yuji, there is a moment of incongruous satisfaction in the way his words, his news, have felled the older man’s mind. Then, moving his cup aside, he bows over the table, forehead almost touching the varnish. ‘Please accept my apologies for not informing you sooner.’

‘Sit up,’ hisses father. ‘You are drawing attention to us.’

Yuji sits up.

‘It would . . .’ begins Father, after a long pause filled by the idiotic, the half mad sighing of the music, ‘it would have been courteous to . . . have chosen a moment when we could have . . discussed this.’ His voice is quiet. There is an edge of irritation, of bewilderment, but no anger. The old fierceness, that severity of character Yuji, as a boy, so dreaded to be the focus of, has not, it seems, returned from the mountain with him.

‘I didn’t know she was carrying a child.’

‘What?’

‘I didn’t know until the end.’

‘But it’s yours?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘I suppose . . . I suppose he has some of your features?’

‘His eyes perhaps. His back . . .’

‘His back?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you’re a father.’

‘Yes.’

‘A father . .’ He shakes his head, lights another cigarette. ‘Tomorrow, this conversation will seem like a dream.’

‘Will you tell Mother?’

‘I have no idea. What can I say to her? By the way, before I boarded the train Yuji informed me of something quite interesting.’

‘I should have spoken sooner.’

‘Of course you should.’

‘You were away.’

‘Please, do not make excuses.’ For a few moments, looking past Yuji, Father gently rubs, with the tip of his thumb, the crease between his eyebrows. ‘I am a grandfather,’ he says at last.

‘Yes.’

‘Your mother is a grandmother.’

‘Yes.’

‘And he, this child, he is with his mother now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Alissa?’

‘Yes.’

‘They intend to return one day?’

‘They still have a house.’

‘In Kanda.’

‘Yes.’

‘And he is healthy.’

‘Yes.’

‘Emile.’

‘Yes.’

‘You could have chosen a name that’s easier to pronounce.’

‘If I have brought shame . . .’

‘It’s not a question of that. It’s not . . . All that . . . With things as they are, I mean. We must think more practically.’

‘Yes.’

‘Do they sell sake in this place?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘A pity.’

Father reaches for the photograph, puts on his glasses again. ‘I should like to have seen him. Once, at least.’

‘Please, take it with you,’ says Yuji.

‘The photograph?’

‘When you tell Mother, you could show it to her.’

‘You have others?’

‘No.’

‘Then you must keep it.’

‘Please take it.’

‘You don’t want it?’

‘It’s not that.’

‘No?’ They look at each other, study each other. The minute hand of the clock slides to ten to the hour.

‘Your train,’ says Yuji.

‘The train? Mmm . .’

Yuji pays. They cross the road in silence, enter the halls of the station.

‘I’m near the engine, I think,’ says Father, hurrying past the steel pillars at the side of the train as a guard follows behind them slamming doors.

‘Here?’

‘Three?’

‘Yes.’

Father climbs the metal steps. Yuji swings up the cases.

‘We cut it fine again,’ says Father through the open window. ‘Another minute . .’

‘Please give Mother my best wishes.’

‘I will.’

‘Thank her for the biscuits.’

‘I will.’

‘And Uncle Kensuke and Auntie Sawa . .’

‘All of them. Yes.’

A bell rings. A bell answers. The guard shouts a final warning.

‘It may be a while,’ says Yuji.

‘You must do what is necessary,’ calls Father. ‘Ryuichi can take care of us now.’ He opens a hand in farewell. Yuji, turning away, shields his eyes from the smoke.

19

While Miyo is out of the house watching, with the neighbourhood children, a show put on by a travelling entertainer (puppets in a shoebox theatre strapped to the back of a bicycle), Yuji telephones Mr Masuda. Masuda sounds as though he has just returned from a long lunch and is, perhaps, considering locking his door and sleeping for an hour, but his voice becomes more attentive when Yuji mentions Horikawa.

‘You used to work for him?’

‘I was the one who wrote the copy for your company last year. “The newest ships, the fastest routes . .” ’

‘“Niigata Docks are truly a gateway to the world.” I remember it. It had a good ring to it.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Mr Horikawa was a man I had a deep respect for. We sometimes played shogi together. Had things been different for him . .’

‘His circumstances . .’

‘Yes . . It is very regrettable.’

‘Yes.’

‘But how is it I can help you, Mr Takano? Is this a business matter?’

20

The maid, a girl with large, drowsy eyes, the sleeves of her kimono tied up, a damp cloth in one hand, ushers Yuji into a room at the back of the house where a window at floor level admits a flow of even, shallow light. She puts out a sitting cushion for him beside the alcove. The scroll in the alcove is an ink drawing of a frog, a slightly mischievous-looking creature described with a half-dozen energetic lines. Something about this picture makes Yuji smile, and he is smiling still when Mrs Miyazaki comes in, bowing, chattering, her face puckered with embarrassment to find herself alone with such an educated young man, a published poet, a friend of her brilliant sons. Also, of course, someone who has seen her in consternation, who has seen her weep.

To calm her, he asks about the drawing of the frog.

‘Junzo chose it,’ she says, ‘before he left. It was the one he liked best for springtime. It’s only a copy of course. I think the original is in a museum in Kamakura. Or Nara? I’m sure you know where it is.’

‘So he’s gone?’

‘It’s nearly two weeks now. The Association of Patriotic Schoolgirls was at the station to wave them off. There were so many of them, all cheering so excitedly it was quite difficult for us to get close to the train and I was afraid we wouldn’t find him. But then I heard his voice, calling me. We had his belt, you see. His thousand-stitch belt. Everyone in the street had sewed a stitch on it, lots of strangers too, though now with women waiting on every corner with needle and thread, it’s a wonder anybody has the time to do anything else, don’t you think?’

‘He’s gone to China?’

‘He said they would be near a big river, though, of course, he wasn’t allowed to tell me any more.’

‘The Yangtze, perhaps.’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Perhaps it was that one.’

‘And Taro? There were two flags outside the house.’

‘He’s in Hanoi,’ she says. ‘They needed people who could speak French.’

‘Translators.’

She nods. ‘We were very honoured.’

‘His French was always better than mine,’ says Yuji.

‘I’m sure that can’t be true,’ she says.

‘I brought something for Junzo. I thought . . I’d hoped he might still be here.’

‘How kind of you,’ she says, glancing at the package in Yuji’s hands.

‘It’s just a book. Some French poems I had when I was at university. I tried to give it to him once before, when he volunteered . . And there’s a letter.’

‘From you?’

‘No. It’s an old letter. Some of us thought it didn’t even exist. But Junzo always believed in it.’

‘So,’ she says, trying not to look confused. ‘It’s an old one, then.’

Yuji puts the package on the mat and with both hands slides it towards Mrs Miyazaki’s knees. Seeing the formality of his gesture, she accepts the package with as low a bow as the fullness of her waist, the tightness of her obi, permits. She touches the indigo cloth, Uncle Kensuke’s ‘test piece’, in which the book and letter are wrapped. ‘And this?’ she asks.

‘Yes,’ says Yuji. ‘It’s all for him.’

For while she sits there, quiet as a flower. Her eyes have brimmed but the tears will not fall in front of him again.

‘You are going away too?’ she asks.

‘Yes.’

‘Then perhaps you will see him. You could give it to him yourself.’

‘I am not going to China,’ says Yuji.

‘No?’

‘Somewhere else.’

‘Ah.’ She nods, then bows again. ‘On behalf of the Miyazaki family, please accept our congratulations. May you return safely one day.’

He thanks her. ‘One day,’ he says.

The door slides open. The maid, excusing herself through a stifled yawn, brings in the tea.

21

One more day for Fujitomi. One more day in the blue van. One more strip of soft money. When Yuji climbs from the van near a tram-stop in Nihombashi, he tells Fujitomi he is closing the house in Hongo.

‘Then you’ll need some help,’ says Fujitomi, wiping the April warmth from his throat. ‘Somewhere to store the valuables?’

Yuji nods.

‘I’ve got a place up in Meguro Ward. Steel door. A ventilation grille even a mosquito would have trouble getting through. I’ve been putting some of my own stuff there . .’

‘Your own?’

‘It’s good to be prepared, eh? When do you need it?’

‘Soon.’

‘How soon?’

‘Tomorrow afternoon?’

‘As soon as that . . Well, let’s see. If I can leave those boxes of Shanghai eggs at the bakers in Monzen Nakacho and find somewhere for the golf balls, the van will be empty enough.’

‘Thank you,’ says Yuji. ‘I’ll be ready.’

They smile at each other through the open window. If, thinks Yuji, Fujitomi asks him a direct question now, if he asks him the direct question, then he will answer it, directly, but Fujitomi, long conditioned by that habitual restraint of curiosity required by the pick-up and delivery business, does not ask.

‘I’ll be there at half twelve,’ he says. ‘People will be busy with the midday meal. We’ll have less of an audience.’ He revs the engine, finds the gear at the third attempt. ‘Looks like I shall have to do my own driving for a while,’ he shouts, then grins, peers from the far window to watch the road, and moves the van, in a series of lurches, into the evening traffic.

When Yuji reaches home, two men walk into the house behind him. They do it so naturally — the air of people whose right to enter this or any house is beyond debate — that Yuji, turning to face them in the vestibule, is, at first, more impressed than alarmed, as if they have performed an interesting trick, a little theatrical coup. One man is several years older than the other. They are wearing smartly pressed but inexpensive suits, the same suits Yuji saw them in outside the cemetery.

‘Surprised to see us?’ asks the elder man.

‘We know all about you,’ says the younger, taking off his shoes and leaving them neatly beside the step.

‘We’re going to have a look around,’ says the elder man. ‘You don’t mind, I hope?’

Miyo comes out of the kitchen. ‘They want to look around,’ says Yuji. She asks if she should serve tea.

‘And something sweet,’ says the elder man. ‘I’m aching for something sweet.’

With Yuji walking between them, an arrangement they seem to fall into quite naturally, they go out to the verandah, put on garden slippers, and follow the curving path of worn and irregular slabs down to the garden study. Yuji opens the door. The study is chill and slightly damp. The elder man starts smoking. As he looks along the shelves he taps his ash into the palm of his hand, then scatters it on the wooden floor. The younger one has a camera. He photographs any book with a foreign title, photographs the photograph of Father with fellow students in a rowing boat on the Sumida, summer 1911. Also the picture beside it, Father and two unidentified foreigners, one a woman, all young, none quite in focus, in front of a statue in a park in London or Paris.

In the house, in the Western room, he takes a photograph of the wireless. In the Japanese room, it’s the empty shelves beside the alcove that interest them.

They go up the stairs, open the storage cupboard, drag everything onto the landing, place in a pile — presumably for later confiscation — the jazz records, a bowler hat, a woman’s felt cloche hat, several elaborately framed portraits of unsmiling ancestors Yuji could not have begun to identify. Then they go to Yuji’s room. In here, locked inside a box of black and bronze tin, he has the telegram from Alissa (‘Arrived Tuesday. All in good health. Emile eats everything.’) He has Feneon’s address in Singapore, a roll of 340 yen and a document authorising passage on the Izu Dancer, a cargo vessel chartered by the West Japan Shipping Corporation leaving Shiminoseki on the fifteenth bound for Tourane, Singkawang, Batavia. (‘I’m in the rubber business now,’ he told Masuda. ‘And as you know, it’s a crucial time for rubber.’)

While the elder man searches through clothes, the younger lays out novels and books of poetry, arranges them first in a line and then in a square, as if it was important not just to present the evidence but to show it in a way that would be aesthetically pleasing.

‘What are these?’ asks the elder man, holding in his palm the last of Dick Amazawa’s pills.

‘I have headaches,’ says Yuji.

‘Shouldn’t read so much,’ says the younger man, who has now found the black and bronze box and is trying, with the pressure of his thumbs, to force up the lid. ‘How does this open?’ he asks.

‘There’s a key,’ says Yuji.

‘Find it.’

‘It’s just some money. Some savings.’

‘Find it.’

The key is in Yuji’s pocket. There is, he knows, not much sense in delaying the moment, but if he is about to be arrested, beaten, imprisoned, he would like a few seconds to prepare himself. Is it worth trying to run? He concentrates on not looking at the platform door. He would have only the smallest possible start on them, but if he could get outside, he could clamber down to the garden. Are they armed? Would they shoot at him? And where would he run to? Kanda? Setagaya? If they know all about him, they know about Kanda and Setagaya.

He pretends to be searching for the key among the clothes tangled on the floor. His mind, little by little, is assuming the blankness of surrender, of dumb capitulation. An hour ago he was free! Free to eat in Otaki’s, free to ride his bicycle, free to make his plans. But already it seems hard to remember it, to recall exactly how that felt. He is about to start on some schoolboy story about having lost the key, or no, given it to someone, someone whose name he has unfortunately forgotten, when the elder man lets out a sharp grunt of surprise. Yuji turns to him. The man is holding the velvet-skinned case. The case is open. The pin, in its satin crease, gleams with the self-contained glamour of a weapon.

‘This yours?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where d’you get it?’

Yuji tells him.

The man stares at him, stares at the pin, runs his tongue along his teeth, glances at the younger man, looks back at the pin. ‘You should have said,’ he says, a high voice, a whine. ‘Now you’ve let us embarrass ourselves. There was no need for that.’

‘I’m sorry,’ says Yuji.

‘We’ve lost face.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You want us to help you put this back?’ He gestures to the floor and, more generally, to the chaos on the landing.

‘There’s no need,’ says Yuji.

‘You should wear it,’ says the man, shutting the case and giving it to Yuji. ‘Save everyone a lot of trouble.’

‘Yes,’ says Yuji. ‘Thank you.’

The younger man hangs his camera over his shoulder. He winks at Yuji. ‘The key,’ he says, ‘it is in your pocket, right?’

22

He has a single tan suitcase with him. He is dressed plainly, the graduation suit again, the austerity hat. When he rose it was dark, when he left it was dark. Now, at six fifteen, the station’s yellow lights are switched off and a crowd of men and women are streaming through the station doors. It is morning, officially.

He has drunk tea and eaten rice in the all-night food stall by the Station Hotel, but there is something wrong with his insides. An hour after the Tokko left he was racked with stomach cramps, followed by violent diarrhoea. It has been over a week now. The cramps have stopped but the diarrhoea remains troublesome, unpredictable.

He stands by a pillar, sits on a bench, studies, as discreetly as he can, what the others do, what is normal. He lines up to buy a newspaper. When he reaches the front of the queue, he becomes confused by the coins in his hand. The vendor is irritated. Time is money. Are there more policemen at the station this morning? More uniforms? Through the clustered speakers above his head a woman’s voice, broken by amplification, is announcing the name and destination of a train. Part of the crowd peels away, advances in close formation. Yuji’s gut grips tighter. He stops, shuts his eyes, breathes. All that has led to this moment is hidden from him. What was it? What made him think he could do this, could break through the black lines? Certainly, he is no longer guided by argument, by any of those justifications he muttered to himself for hours in the sewing room. All he has left now are skin memories. The ghostly weight of a child in his arms, a woman’s hair on his face . . How can that possibly be enough?

He picks up his case, drags it up the stairs, moves shoulder to shoulder with strangers, sees a train, sees a carriage number, starts to climb aboard, is stopped, shows his ticket. ‘This one’s for Hamamatsu,’ says the guard, his face and voice quite unexpectedly friendly, solicitous even. He points the way. Yuji crosses under the line, surfaces, walks up beside another train. There’s a board on the platform: ‘Shiminoseki Express 0715.’ It is not one of Kyoko’s days, he knows this, but edging along the corridor, his case knocking against the calves of people leaning from the windows, he constantly expects to see her, to meet her startled gaze.

He finds his compartment. A man and woman are already there, people his parents’ age. He nods to them, takes the seat opposite. Under his suit he is sweating, heavily. Does he look like a fugitive? Like one of the spies the association pamphlets urge citizens to be vigilant for? (‘He will not reveal himself by his dress or manners. He will be cautious at all times.’)

‘You should put it up,’ says the man, pointing to the luggage rack. Yuji lifts the case. If the lock failed now, some clothes would fall out, an oiled silk raincoat, a pair of straw sandals, a night-kimono, a towel, a pair of schoolboy’s white gloves with stitching on the back and mother-of-pearl button at the wrist. He has a few books with him: Akutagawa, Soseki, Kafu. He has no foreign books. Nor in the end did he take his last copy of Electric Dragonfly, a little book that has always weighed too much. He has the photograph from the dresser in the Western room of Father and Mother on their wedding day, stiff as dolls. He has the pin. He has his money, his pass for the Izu Dancer. Also a letter, typed in the garden study, purporting to be from a rubber trader in Batavia inviting him to visit as soon as possible. It might, perhaps, fool someone.

Are they moving? No . . Yes! They are moving, and for a moment he is thrown into confusion by his failure to notice it the instant it began. He turns to the window, grasps his knees, forces from his mind the memory of Miyo sobbing in the dark next to the vestibule step. As they pass through the marshalling yards they pick up speed. It’s a beautiful morning, the sun, the pure spring sun, cresting the roofs of the Low City. He narrows his eyes and stares, wills himself to be a camera, to see and keep everything, but everything, the moment it appears, is swept away as though it was not really his to see any more. He sits back, opens the paper, hides behind the paper, looks at the senseless words, the senseless pictures.

‘You’re going all the way?’ asks the man.

‘All . .?’ says Yuji, lowering the paper.

‘To Shiminoseki?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s a long ride.’

‘Yes.’

‘We’ve been visiting family. We’re from Hiroshima.’

Yuji nods.

The man looks at him, waiting. ‘And you?’ he asks.

‘Me?’ says Yuji, wondering if the carriage toilet is already occupied, if it is too soon to go and look. ‘I’m from here.’ He gestures to the window. ‘I’m from Tokyo.’