Kazuo Ishiguro (12 page)

My first thought was that I was about to be scolded, perhaps for something I had just said which had displeased her. It was not even unheard of for my mother to switch moods abruptly in the midst of a harmonious exchange and scold me for some suddenly remembered misdemeanour committed earlier in the day. But as I fell silent in readiness for just such an explosion, I realised she was listening. Then the next instant she had turned and pushed open with great suddenness the door to my father’s study.

I caught a glimpse past my mother’s frame of the inside of the room. My abiding image is of my father slumped forward over his bureau, his face covered in perspiration and contorted with frustration. It is possible he was sobbing and it was this sound that had caught my mother’s attention. In front of him, all over his desk, there were papers, ledgers, notebooks. I noticed -1 believe I followed my mother’s gaze - more papers and notebooks on the floor, as though he had hurled them there in a temper fit. He was looking up at us, startled, and then the next moment he said in a voice that rather shocked me: ‘We can’t do it! We’ll never get back! We can’t do it! You’re asking too much, Diana. It’s too much!’

My mother said something to him under her breath, no doubt some reprimand to make him pull himself together. My father did collect himself a little at this point and, glancing past my mother, looked at me for the first time. But almost instantly his face creased again with despair and, turning to my mother, he said again, shaking his head helplessly: ‘We can’t do it, Diana. It’ll be the ruin of us. I’ve looked at everything. We’ll never get back to England. We can’t raise enough. Without the firm, we’re simply stranded.’

Then he seemed to lose control again, and as my mother began to say something else - something in her quiet, angry voice - my father began to shout, not so much at her as at the walls of his study: ‘I won’t do it, Diana! My God, who do you take me for? It’s beyond me, you hear? Beyond me! I can’t do it!’

Possibly at this point my mother closed the door on him and led me away. I have no further memory of the episode. And of course, I cannot be sure of the exact sentiments, let alone the exact words, my father was uttering that day. But this is how, admittedly with some hindsight, I have come to shape that memory.

At the time, it was simply a bewildering experience for me, and although I probably found it interesting that my father should, like me, have moments of crying and shouting, I did not much ask myself what it had all been about. Besides, when I next saw my father he was his normal self again, and for her part my mother never alluded to the incident. If my father had not, years later, made that curious speech beside the bandstand, I would probably never have dredged up this memory at all.

But as I say, apart from these curious little episodes, there is little that seems worth remembering from that autumn and the dull winter that followed it. I was listless for much of that period and was delighted when one afternoon Mei Li quite casually gave me the news that Akira had returned from Japan, that at that very moment, in the drive next door, his luggage was being unloaded off the motor car.

Akira, I was delighted to learn, had returned to Shanghai not just for a visit, but for the foreseeable future, with plans to resume at his old school in the North Szechwan Road at the start of the summer term. I cannot remember if the two of us celebrated his return in any special way. I have the impression we simply picked up our friendship where we had left off the previous autumn with minimum fuss. I was quite curious to hear about Akira’s experiences in Japan, but he persuaded me it would be childish - somehow beneath us - to discuss such matters, and so we made a show of continuing with our old routines as if nothing had ever interrupted them. I guessed of course that all had not gone well for him in Japan, but did not begin to suspect the half of it until that warm spring day he tore the sleeve of his kimono.

When we played outside, Akira usually dressed much as I did - in shirt, shorts and, on the hotter days, sun hat. But on that particular morning we were playing on the mound at the back of our garden, he was wearing a kimono - not anything special, just one of the garments he often wore around his house. We had been running up and down the mound enacting some drama when he suddenly stopped near the summit and sat down with a frown. I thought he had injured himself but, when I came up to him, saw he was examining a tear on the sleeve of the kimono. He was doing so with the utmost concern, and I believe I said to him something like: ‘What’s wrong? Your maid or someone will sew that in no time.’

He did not respond - he seemed for the moment to have forgotten my presence entirely - and I realised he was sinking into a deep gloom before my eyes. He went on examining the tear for a few more seconds, then letting down his arm, stared blankly at the earth in front of him as though a great tragedy had just occurred.

‘This is third time.’ he muttered quietly. ‘Third time same week I do bad thing.’

Then as I continued to gaze at him somewhat baffled, he said: “Third bad thing. Now mother and father, they make me go back Japan.’

I could not, of course, see how a small tear in an old kimono could bring such consequences, but I was for the moment sufficiently alarmed by this prospect to crouch down beside him and urgently demand an explanation for his words. But I could get little more out of my friend that morning - he grew increasingly sulky and closed - and I seem to remember our parting not on the best of terms. Over the following weeks, however, I gradually discovered what had lain behind his odd behaviour.

From his very first day in Japan, Akira had been thoroughly miserable. Although he never admitted this explicitly, I surmised that he had been mercilessly ostracised for his ‘foreignness’; his manners, his attitudes, his speech, a hundred other things had marked him out as different, and he had been taunted not just by his fellow pupils, but by his teachers and even - he hinted at this more than once - by the relatives in whose house he was staying. In the end, so profound was his unhappiness, his parents had been obliged to bring him home in the middle of a school term.

The thought that he might have to return again to Japan was one that haunted my friend. The fact was his parents missed Japan badly and often talked of the family returning there.

With his older sister, Etsuko, not at all averse to living in Japan, Akira realised he was alone in wishing the family to remain in Shanghai; that it was only his strong opposition to the idea that prevented his parents packing their things and sailing for Nagasaki, and he was not at all sure how much longer his preferences could expect to take precedence over those of his sister and parents. Things were very much in the balance, and any displeasure he incurred - any misdemeanour, any falling off of his schoolwork - could tip the scales against him. Hence his supposition that a small tear in a kimono sleeve might easily produce the gravest of consequences.

As it turned out, the torn kimono did not incur his parents’ wrath nearly to the extent feared, and certainly nothing momentous came of the matter. But throughout those months following his return, there would come along one little mishap after another to plunge my friend back into his pit of worry and despondency. The most significant of these, I suppose, was the affair concerning Ling Tien and our ‘robbery’ - the ‘crime from my past’ which so aroused Sarah’s curiosity during our bus ride this afternoon.

Ling Tien had been with Akira’s family for as long as they had been in Shanghai. Among my earliest memories of going next door to play are those of the old servant shuffling about the place with his broom. He looked very old, always wore a heavy dark gown even in the summer, a cap and a pigtail. Unlike the other Chinese servants in the neighbourhood, he rarely smiled at children, but then nor did he scowl or shout at us, and had it not been for Akira’s attitude to him, it is unlikely I would ever have regarded him as an object of fear. Indeed, I remember I was initially more puzzled than anything by the alarm that would seize Akira whenever the servant came within our vicinity.

If for instance Ling Tien was passing in the corridor, my friend would break off whatever we were doing to stand rigidly in a part of the room not visible to the old man and not move again until the danger had passed. In those early days of our friendship, I had yet to become infected by Akira’s sense of dread, assuming that it derived from something specific that had occurred between him and Ling Tien. As I say, I was more puzzled than anything, but whenever I asked Akira to explain his behaviour, he simply ignored me. In time I came to appreciate how deeply embarrassed he was by his inability to control his dread of Ling Tien and learnt to say nothing whenever our games were disrupted in this manner.

But then as we grew older, I imagine Akira began to feel the need to justify his fear. By the time we were seven or eight, the sight of Ling Tien would no longer cause my friend to freeze; instead, he would break off whatever he was doing and look at me with a strange grin. Then putting his mouth close to my ear, he would recite in a curious monotone - not unlike that of the monks we sometimes heard chanting at the Boone Road market - the most terrifying revelations concerning the old servant.

I thus learnt of Ling Tien’s fearful passion for hands. Akira had once happened to glance down the servants’ corridor towards Ling Tien’s room on a rare occasion when the old man had left his door ajar, and had seen heaped upon the floor the severed hands of men, women, children, apes. Another time, late at night, Akira had spotted the servant carrying a basket into the house piled with the dismembered little arms of monkeys.

We had always to be on our guard, Akira warned me. If we gave him the slightest opportunity, Ling Tien would not hesitate to cut off our hands.

When after a number of such briefings, I enquired as to why Ling Tien was so keen on hands, Akira looked at me carefully, then asked if I could be entrusted with his family’s darkest secret. When I assured him I could, he thought a little longer before saying finally: “Then I tell you, old chap! Terrible reason! Why Ling cut off hands. I tell you!’

Ling Tien, evidently, had discovered a method by which he could turn severed hands into spiders. In his room were many bowls filled with various fluids in which he soaked for several months at a time the many hands he had collected. Slowly the fingers would start to move by themselves - just little twitches at first, then coiling motions; finally dark hairs would grow and Ling Tien would then take them out of the fluids and set them loose, as spiders, all around the neighbourhood. Akira had often heard the old servant creeping out in the dead of night to do just this. My friend had once even seen in the garden, moving through the undergrowth, a mutant Ling had taken prematurely from its solution which did not yet fully resemble a spider and could easily be identified as a severed hand.

Although even at that age I did not entirely believe these stories, they certainly upset me and for some time the mere sight of Ling Tien was enough to set off terrors within me. Indeed, as we grew older, we neither of us quite shook off our horror of Ling Tien. This was something that always nagged at Akira’s pride, and around the time we were eight, he seemed to develop a need constantly to challenge these old fears. I often remember him dragging me off to some point in his house where we could spy on Ling Tien sweeping the path or whatever. I did not mind these spying sessions so much, but what I came to dread were those occasions Akira would persistently dare me to go near Ling Tien’s room.

Until this point we had kept well clear of that room, especially since Akira had always maintained the fumes from Ling Tien’s fluids were liable to hypnotise us and draw us in through the door. But now the notion of going near the room became for my friend something of an obsession. We might be having a conversation about something quite different, and then suddenly that strange grin would appear on his face and he would start to whisper: ‘Are you frighten? Christopher, are you frighten?’

He would then oblige me to follow him through his house, through those oddly furnished rooms, to the heavy-beamed arch that marked the start of the servants’ quarters. Going under the arch, we would find ourselves standing in a gloomy corridor of bare polished boards, at the far end of which, facing us, was the door of Ling Tien’s room.

First, I would only be required to stand at the arch and watch as Akira pushed himself step by step along the corridor until he had covered perhaps half the distance to that awful room. I can still see my friend, his tubby figure stiff with tension, his face, whenever he glanced back at me, shining with perspiration, willing himself a few steps further before turning and running back with his triumphant grin. Then would come all his goading and bullying until I eventually found the nerve to match his feat. For quite a time, as I say, these tests of courage concerning Ling Tien’s room came rather to obsess Akira, and took much out of the pleasure of going to play at his house.

For some time yet, though, it was to remain beyond either of us to walk right up to the door, let alone to go through it. By the time we finally entered Ling Tien’s room, we were both ten, and it was - although of course I did not know it then - my last year in Shanghai. That was when Akira and I committed our little theft an impulsive act whose wider repercussions, in our excitement, we failed entirely to anticipate.

We had always known Ling Tien would be going away for six days in early August to visit his home village near Hangchow, and we had talked often about how we would then take the opportunity finally to enter that room. And sure enough, on the first afternoon after Ling Tien’s departure, I turned up at Akira’s house to find my friend entirely preoccupied with the matter. By this time, I should say, I was in general a much more confident person than even a year earlier, and if I still felt a little of that old dread of Ling Tien, I would certainly not have shown it. In fact, I believe I was much the calmer about the prospect of entering the room - something I am sure my friend noticed and saw as an extra dimension to the challenge.