Fishing for Stars (47 page)

‘So who do I call if you don’t come back to the hotel?’ I asked, feeling helpless.

‘
Korin-san
 . . . er, Miss Sparkle.’

‘The
yakuza
! I thought you said you’d had a gutful of them?’

‘It’s not the same. We’re old friends. This is strictly girls’ stuff.’

‘So what do I do? Sit on my arse all day waiting for your instructions?’ I asked, repaying her for her reproaches over my leaving the hotel when she’d been kidnapped.

Anna didn’t bite. ‘You said Mitsubishi called, didn’t you, and wanted approval for the modifications to the freighters you requested?’

‘Well yes, but it isn’t strictly necessary, and then we decided to leave Japan immediately.’

‘No, Nicholas,
you
decided to leave Japan. I need a few days, so why don’t you spend them checking your freighters?’

‘Like I said, it really isn’t necessary. I’ve seen the drawings, that’s all that’s needed,’ I replied sulkily.

‘Nicholas, stop it!’ Anna yelled impatiently. ‘What’s got into you?’ She sighed deeply. ‘We were always going to visit the World Expo at Osaka. Why don’t you spend three or four days there? You’ll be better on your own looking at things that interest men. Besides, the break will be good for us both.’ She gave me a look that clearly suggested I should get out of her goddamn hair.

I sometimes think I must be a weak bastard. A man ought’a take her and put her over his knee and give her a bloody good spanking. Then, despite myself, I was forced to grin. I’d tried that once, with surprising results. Between the two of them, Anna and Marg, even the biblical Job with his Old Testament patience would have been forced to throw in the towel. ‘Expo? Okay, good idea,’ I said, accepting defeat. ‘I’ll go today.’

‘Call me in the early evenings when you can. I won’t leave until 8 p.m.,’ Anna said.

‘Just because I fucked up the kidnapping! I get the message, I’m not needed,’ I joked.

Anna came over and hugged me, then kissed me properly, deeply, meaningfully, lovingly, knowingly and insincerely on the mouth, then pulling back she grinned wickedly. ‘Sometimes a woman’s gotta do what a woman’s gotta do!’ she said. ‘Trust me, Nicholas.’

But I wasn’t fooled for a moment. If Anna was preparing to restore her self-respect, then I almost felt sorry for the poor bugger. Konoe Akira was in for a bumpy ride.

I called Anna from Osaka the next evening, and knowing she wasn’t going to talk about the Jade House I jabbered on about the Expo and in particular the American pavilion where, after the recent Apollo 13 moon mission abort and rescue, the space exhibition was by far the most popular exhibit. The model of the Apollo 11 spacecraft could be seen towering against the skyline a kilometre away, which was also the length of the queue to enter the pavilion to see samples of moon rock gathered by the Armstrong-led first moon landing. A guide informed me that people slept in the line at night.

I decided to give it a miss, instead visiting the near-deserted Russian stand to see the Sputnik. I recall yakking on to Anna in a somewhat disparaging tone. ‘Despite Yuri Gagarin being the first man in space in 1961, the Russians have been left out in the cold. I now know why it’s called the Cold War! As far as space is concerned the fighting for superiority is over. The Sputnik is a tin humpy and the Apollo, a Hilton Hotel. Believe you me,’ I said with some conviction, ‘the Ruskies are not in the race, space or otherwise!’

So much for Nick Duncan’s sagacity. As I write this, the Russians in their cramped Soyuz TMA spacecraft and padded silver spacesuits have for several years been, and still largely are, the leaders in space science and technology. As an aside, I recently heard a story, whether apocryphal or not I can’t say, regarding the Americans boasting about their space pen at an international space conference. It had taken a great deal of money and years of research, but they had finally cracked the technology required to create a ballpoint pen that would write in space. A Russian space scientist in the audience stood up and asked, ‘Why didn’t you simply use a pencil, comrade?’

Anyway, we chatted on, talking about nothing very much, the subject of Konoe Akira and the Jade House studiously avoided. Anna told me how Miss Sparkle had taken the afternoon off so that they could visit several small markets together, which she found fascinating, and how, at the crack of dawn tomorrow, she was being picked up by a
wakagashira
to visit the Tsukiji Fish Market, the largest in Tokyo.

‘Since when have you been remotely interested in fish?’ I asked.

‘Nicholas, did you realise that the Japanese constitute two per cent of the world’s population and eat ten per cent of its fish?’

‘Never was a great fish eater,’ I replied. ‘Though I’m not surprised. Have you ever seen a bento box without a lump of fish?’

‘It’s a commodity and the seas are full of the stuff,’ Anna said in an equally off-hand manner. Then, laughing, she said, ‘I recall you saying once that bricks sit in one place and grow old. I didn’t agree, still don’t, but maybe I should think beyond bricks and mortar to commodities like fish, tuna, shark fins . . . who knows?’

‘Shark fins!’

‘There are a billion Chinese in the world and they make a lot of soup.’ Anna laughed.

‘Is that why you’re going to the fish market tomorrow?’

‘Well, no, but it should be fun. Why not?’

How stupid was I. Anna never did anything in her life unless she had a good reason. She was a planner, a long-term thinker, but not a gambler. She was up to something but it was pointless asking, so instead I said, ‘Glad you’re enjoying Miss Sparkle’s company. I’m surprised
Fuchida-san
lets her onto the street with that small fortune dangling from her ears. Who’ll answer the phone?’

‘She’s an enterprising woman.’ Anna laughed, then changed the subject. ‘How are the cuts and bruises?’ she asked.

‘Itchy, but the good news in the bruise department is that I woke up this morning feeling reunited with my libido.’

‘Good, you’ll get the attention you deserve when you return,’ she promised, a smile in her voice. ‘Have you seen a doctor, had the cuts dressed?’

‘Yeah, there’s a clinic around the corner from the hotel. I had to wait an hour. The place was full of people wearing cotton masks. You wouldn’t know it was spring – everyone’s got the sniffles. We’d call it Asian flu, but here they’re blaming it on all the
gaijin
visiting Expo, calling it Australian flu. Lots of Australians here. The stitches are due to come out in four days, but I’ll wait until we get back to Australia.’ The small talk was intended to tell her I understood she wasn’t ready to talk about Konoe Akira.

‘Four days, that’s good,’ she said abstractedly, then there was a short silence and a deep breath. ‘Nicholas, I need at least another week, probably ten days here.’

I could tell she was waiting for the explosion to follow. In fact, it took some restraint on my part not to react. I’d allowed her the four days she wanted and now she was demanding even more. ‘What’s another week when you’re trying to reverse twenty-five years of psychological damage?’ I answered coolly.

Anna wasn’t fooled. ‘Please, Nicholas, don’t be angry,’ she begged.

‘I’m
not
angry!’ I protested, because of course I was.

‘It’s not what you think, Nicholas,’ she said, her voice on the edge of tears.

‘Think? You asked me for four days more in Japan and I agreed. Now you want another week after that? What am I supposed to think? You haven’t told me what you’re doing at the Jade House and you haven’t mentioned the dreaded you-know-who!’

‘Please, Nicholas, I can’t say. Please trust me, darling, this is for both of us!’ she cried.

‘Well thank you very much! Leave me out of it! If you can’t trust me with ten . . . eleven days of your life, I don’t want to know!’

‘Oh, Nicholas, you simply don’t understand, do you?’ and she promptly burst into tears.

I sighed loudly, fairly confident that the tears were not entirely genuine. The problem with fights on the phone is that you’re on automatic pilot. You can’t read the body language, an essential guide when quarrelling with a woman – well, with Anna and Marg, anyway. I’m not saying Anna couldn’t conceal her feelings, because she was a master at doing so in a business context, but up close and personal she was less successful. A voice choked with tears is auditory manipulation, but I needed to be able to see her to know how upset she really was and what thoughts she imagined she was hiding from me. After spending much of my adult life with two difficult and complex women, I’d picked up most of the flicks, ticks, clucks, sighs, gestures and signals that indicated what was really going on. Now I heard Anna’s lachrymose gulp, then the shift down to more serious tears, then a moment’s pause before the double declutch as she shifted emotional gears. ‘You bastard, Nick! Piss off! Go home! Leave me alone! Bugger off! I hate you, I hate you!’ Then there was the crunch of rough gear changes ending in a roar of sobbing.

I was flying blind. ‘Right then! I’m on tomorrow’s flight home,’ I said, my voice crisp. I was calling Anna’s bluff, taking the chance that I was reading her correctly, that this wasn’t the same as the panic attack at the Imperial.

Bang!
Down went the receiver. I lay back on the bed in my hotel room and began to count. At one hundred and fifty-three the bedside phone rang. I let it ring six times before reaching for it. ‘Hello?’ I said, my voice icy calm.

‘Nicholas, I want to apologise. Can we start again? Please . . . don’t go home, darling. I love you! It’s just . . . it’s been such a stressful day.’ All of this was delivered in a carefully modulated and deeply sincere voice, punctuated with one or two nice little half-tearful gulps.

I confess I was tempted to ask what was so stressful about visiting a series of traditional markets with Miss Sparkle, but I thought better of it and then capitulated as usual. ‘I’ve been here one and a half days, which is enough Expo for any man, but I’ve always wanted to cycle through the Japanese countryside, stay in the traditional inns, eat the regional food, get out of the urban sprawl and have a good look around in the countryside. Might even buy a butterfly net . . . why not? Should take around ten days . . .’

‘Oh, darling Nicholas, thank you, thank you!’ Anna cried, as I well knew she would.
Weak bastard!
I thought. Moreover, I wasn’t at all sure Anna hadn’t orchestrated the whole thing, or at least extemporised brilliantly and assumed control early on in the argument. So much for my perspicacity; I was armed only with a penknife, fencing with a master swordswoman. Besides, I’ve never been much good on the phone – one of the reasons Marg works me over so efficiently on her morning calls to Beautiful Bay.

As it turned out the ten days that followed proved to be personally rewarding. Anna and I were not able to stay in touch by phone, which was probably a good thing.

The fondly imagined dreamscapes of Japanese paintings – festoons of pink cherry blossom, temple eaves and red-painted wooden
torii
[gates], a solitary geisha shuffling in wooden clogs along a cobbled lane – don’t exist except in Kyoto, where at festival times the dream delivers, and tradition and the old ways somehow endure.

I was to learn that there are two Japans and that this dichotomy isn’t, as might be expected, between city and country, urban and rural, but rather between mountains and bumpy valleys. Japan is chock-full of people. Seemingly countless villages are strung together by rice paddies and small green fields, the whole landscape dominated by the exigencies of human life.

To be fair, where I cycled the country could only be described as semi-rural. One was more likely to come across a
pachinko
hall than a temple. Every village seemed to have one of these glitzy gambling parlours, flashing gaudy musk-pink, blue, mauve and green neon. Gambling, so long forbidden in Japan, had reached epidemic proportions. God had been replaced by greed, atmosphere by avarice, temples by
pachinko
parlours, the white-robed Shinto priests by the black suits and sunglasses of the
yakuza
, the tattooed thugs who own or control these ubiquitous gambling joints.

Cycling through the undulating countryside on the first day proved fairly monotonous, and pedalling caused not a little pain to my patched-up bum. A day later I took the advice of an old man selling almonds at the roadside and abandoned my bicycle for a backpack and two bamboo poles, a stout one to use for walking and a long slender one for a butterfly net. I purchased a length of strong but pliable wire, a couple of yards of fine muslin and a packet of nylon fishing line and, as I had done so often before, fashioned a tolerably commendable butterfly net in half an hour. My final purchase was several dozen sheets of paper to fashion my butterfly envelopes, whereupon I headed for the foothills of the higher mountains, some of which still carried more than a dusting of early-spring or late-winter snow.

Japan has 238 species of butterfly and the Osaka area is conspicuous for its fifty-two varieties, none of them particularly rare, but it gave my ramble in the foothills a sense of purpose. Besides, it would be lots of fun. This late in spring, most of the pupae would have hatched.

It was here in the dark shade of beech forests and winding, moss-covered mountain paths that I came across the second Japan of quiet
ryokan
[traditional inns] and tiny Buddhist monasteries, where at either place I might stop to eat an entirely vegetarian meal consisting of dozens of kinds of mushrooms, tofu, rice and many unidentifiable dried foods, some pushed aside after a tentative taste to be attempted at some future time.