One Morning Like a Bird (2 page)

    ‘You haven’t been out to see me for a while,’ says Grandfather.

    ‘Please excuse me  . . . I’ve been meaning to.’

    ‘I’ve made some interesting additions to the model.’

    ‘Yes? I’ll come soon.’

    ‘You should. I’ll be dead one of these days, you know.’

    Father leads Dr Kushida into the room. The doctor is chaffing his hands. ‘The snow at last,’ he says, bowing to Grandfather. ‘Started just as I was passing the botanical gardens. One minute nothing, the next  . . .’

    ‘I could smell it as I set out,’ says Grandfather. ‘Like iron.’

    Miyo brings in a tray of red and gold cups, red and gold flasks, the festival set. Father and the doctor light cigarettes. Yuji coughs. The scroll in the alcove is a Chinese painting of two figures with packs on their backs labouring up a hill where the pine trees are bent almost double by the weight of the snow. On the shelves beside the alcove is Father’s collection of antique incense burners.

    ‘I have a new patient at the clinic,’ says the doctor, combing his moustache with the tips of his fingers. ‘Came in at the beginning of the week. Name of Amano. He was’ – turning to Father – ‘at Imperial the same time as us or, at least, there was an overlap – 1911, I think.’

    ‘Is his case serious?’ asks Father.

    ‘I’m afraid so.’

    ‘Mmm.’

    For several minutes they discuss him, this Amano, or someone who, in 1911, might have been Amano. Was he in the rowing team? Was he the one whose elder brother died of blowfish poisoning? Or was that Maruyama?

    Grandfather holds out his cup for Miyo to fill. He stares impassively through the smoky air. He does not think highly of the doctor, once describing him – to Father! – as having the looks of a Meiji petty bureaucrat, the type he’d had to deal with at the mayor’s office in the days he was selling his transport interests to the city. And what can ‘university talk’ mean to one who was earning his rice in the wards of the Low City by the time he was twelve? The life at Imperial, the high ideas and the in-fighting, must be as strange to him as the dancing of cranes.

    Haruyo appears, informs them the bath is ready. As their guest, Kushida has the fresh water, then Grandfather, Father, Yuji and finally – as Mother and Haruyo bathed in the morning – the little serving girl, Miyo. The bathroom is on the ground floor, opposite the panelled wall of the stairs where the telephone (one of three private lines in the street) is mounted. At one time the water was heated with coal, but five years ago, when everything in Father’s world suggested only serene progress towards an honourable retirement, a new system was installed to heat the water electrically, a method everyone praised as clean and modern (and long overdue) but that has somehow never worked as well as the coal.

    Crouching in the tepid steam, Yuji washes at the bucket, then lowers himself into the water on thin white arms. The bath is a wooden oval bound with hoops of steel, a little land-locked boat. Whenever Kushida bathes at the house, whenever Yuji has to use his water, he is sure he can smell Lysol disinfectant in the steam, just as he is sure he can smell it on his clothes for several hours after he has been up to the clinic to collect Mother’s drugs. He rests his chin on the tension of the water and finds himself thinking of Amano, of poor Amano in his metal-frame bed listening to the horns of the New Year traffic, to the nurses scuffing along the polished corridors in their paper shoes. It was Monsieur Feneon, one French Club night at his house in Kanda – the discussion taking an unusually serious turn – who said that while everyone understood that everyone must die, no one was able to imagine his own death. Imagination, he told them, baulked at that. But could this be true of Amano now? Must he not, as gravely ill as the doctor suggested, imagine his own end constantly? And what does he picture? His wife and children standing around him weeping or bored, and then, at last, the white cloth, which someone has been carrying carefully folded for just this purpose, floating down to cover his face? Or is he beyond anything so obvious, so literal, and sees instead his death figured in a sequence of memory, something mysteriously retained and played like ten frames of film in a relentless loop against the inner skin of his eyelids?

    Yuji slides beneath the water, lies there in a foetal hunch. Because his chest is weak, he cannot hold his breath for long. He listens to the world played through the water, to the muffled drumming of his heart. A poet, even one who has not written in almost two years (who poetry has abandoned as mysteriously, as abruptly, as it arrived), has a duty to imagine what imagination baulks at, but the best he can achieve before the air in his lungs starts to burn is something indistinct and swirling, a patch of brightness disappearing into the general dark, like a coin sinking to the bottom of a pond, or the moon through blown clouds, or a head, a face white as a mask, peering through smoke  . . .

    He surfaces. Whoops for breath.

After the baths, more sake. Grandfather has brought with him a bottle tapped from the cask he receives each year from a business associate who retired up in Iwate. Miyo and Haruyo bring through trays of food – clear soup, steamed yellowtail, deep-fried tofu, pickles and rice. At half past eleven the dishes are cleared, and everyone, with the exception of Mother who goes nowhere, and Haruyo, who goes nowhere with her, prepares to leave for the shrine.

    Of the men, only Grandfather is wearing a kimono. Father and the doctor are identical in suits, sack coats and homburgs. Yuji is in a woollen jacket, and a coat that looks, from a distance, as if it might be made of camel hair, like Monsieur Feneon’s. Miyo, thin as young bamboo, has on her usual kimono of dark blue stripes on grey, a black jacket, a grey shawl, colours appropriate to her station, and ones that will not offend those guardians, official and unofficial, of the new austerity, among whom Haruyo it seems now numbers herself, for she has already made the girl wipe off the smear of lipstick she had put on, and would have forced her to remove the comb from her hair, the tortoiseshell one with moonstones Mother gave her last summer for her fourteenth birthday, if Father had not spoken up for her. (‘No one will notice such a trifle.’)

    In the front garden, those five yards between the porch and the street, the snow is already ankle-deep. It lies like laundry in the arms of the persimmon tree outside Mother’s window, and like a perfect scoop of sugar on the saddle of Yuji’s bicycle, which he has left propped against the fence. They gather in the street, adjust hats and scarves, put up their umbrellas. On the gate of the neighbouring house a lantern is burning beside the coil of sacred rope, and on the pavement below two sets of footprints are filling with fresh snow.

    Grandfather gestures to the flag that drifts and snaps from a nail in the pillar of the gate. ‘Is that a decoration,’ he asks, ‘or is the boy still away?’

    ‘Saburo?’ asks Yuji. ‘He’s not expected back for months.’

    ‘So the wife lives alone with the old woman? That can’t be much fun for her.’

    ‘Three more flags in this street alone since the fighting at Changsha,’ says Father. ‘Half the city must be over there by now.’

    ‘Well,’ says Kushida, buttoning a glove, ‘not every young man needs to worry about that.’ He glances at Yuji. Yuji bobs his head. Father mutters something. Grandfather grunts but says nothing. They start to walk.

    Halfway to the shrine, they hear the first bell, the first deep note of the hundred and eight. Moments later the air is a solemn confusion of bell answering bell across the widths of the city.

    A voice cries, ‘The Year of the Dragon!’ Neighbours flit past – Mr and Mrs Itaki, Kiyama the wedding photographer, the Ozonos. Then out of the veils of snow directly in front of them appears Father’s old assistant, Tozaburo Segoshi, with his wife and two gangling teenage daughters at his side, the same Segoshi who rose through the law department at Imperial by clinging to Father’s bootlaces, who has made a career for himself by filling out the margins of Father’s work. Seeing Father, he stops mid-stride, emits a mew of embarrassment, and hurries off at such a pace his women, hobbled by the tight skirts of their kimonos, can barely keep up with him. Even a year ago he would have stopped and bowed profoundly. He would have waited for Father to pass. He would have been honoured.

    At the shrine, they join the back of the crowd and shuffle through the churned snow between big yellow lanterns. Ahead of them, muffled handclaps summon the
kami
. The snow is lighter now, and as the last flakes fall the air turns sweet with the steam from the hot sake the priests and shrine-virgins are ladling from cauldrons big as baths. Grandfather gives Miyo a pair of coins to make her offering and buy herself a trinket at one of the stalls lining the path. Yuji waits, considering whether he too might be given something. And then the thought strikes him – if Father one day mused aloud, however obscurely, about the difficulty of managing without his salary from the university, of living on his savings, could it even have been
Grandfather
who suggested the allowance be scrapped?

    He hangs back, slips away, climbs onto a stone by one of the vermilion gates and looks out over army caps and student caps, over shawls and scarves and the bright lacquer of women’s hair. He is hoping for a moment of casual good fortune, and that out of all this crowd he will spy Kyoko Kitamura, whose footprints were one of the sets leading through the snow from the neighbours’ gate. His plan – a plan that never varies – is to catch her attention without, at the same time, being discovered by the old woman. If he succeeds, then Kyoko, supposing she is in an indulgent mood (and why should she not be on New Year’s Eve?), might find some way to join him for a minute, perhaps share a baked sweet potato with him in the shadow of a camphor tree. But if the old woman sees him, then the game is up, and not out of any unusual zeal on her part to keep her grandson’s wife guarded, but because she cannot forgive Yuji for living a safe and idle life while Saburo, only child of her only son, risks everything. She has a photograph of Saburo, a big one she keeps beside the god-shelf and which, one morning, she invited Yuji to admire and be shamed by. A picture taken in a studio in Nanking, Saburo in a winter coat with fur collar (non-standard issue), his left shoulder turned to the camera to show off his acting corporal’s chevron. A handsome soldier, the sort schoolgirls develop squints knitting mittens for. And should something happen to him – a not unlikely prospect, as everyone knows the casualty lists are far longer than those names inscribed each year in the Yaskuni shrine – then it seems certain the old woman, in her grief, her rage, will denounce Yuji as a coward, accuse him in front of Itaki the tobacconist, Otaki the noodle-seller, Ozono the brush-maker, in front of the whole street. For what would restrain her? Is it not true that these days the Takano family can be insulted at will?

    Someone is calling him. He turns, scans, sees at last, in the light of a kite stall, the Miyazaki brothers, Taro and Junzo, waving to him. He waves back, pushes through to them. They exchange their New Year greetings, first in their own tongue, then, more quietly, as fellow members of the club, in French.

    ‘Your people here?’ asks Taro.

    ‘Somewhere,’ says Yuji.

    ‘Ours too,’ says Taro. ‘Somewhere.’

    ‘Have you noticed,’ says Junzo, leaning and speaking in a stage whisper, ‘how the priests all look a bit Chinese this year? And there’s a definite smell of garlic about the place. Shouldn’t we, as respectable citizens, report them to the
Tokko
?’

    Taro punches his brother’s shoulder. He’s grinning but there’s no amusement in his eyes. ‘Little brother’s had a few,’ he says.

    Yuji nods, looks from one to the other – from Junzo, with his hair poking in tufts from under his student cap, a yellow scarf wound round his neck and trailing almost to the ground, to Taro, who, in his new hat, his new coat (a ministry pin on the lapel like a drop of spilt silver), is as neat as the menswear poster outside the Shirokiya department store. There’s a second of silence between them, then, as though to cover an unexpected awkwardness, they start, in hurried voices, to speak about the French Club’s year-forgetting party at the Feneons’, and laugh, all three genuinely amused this time, at the recollection of Junzo’s barking competition with Feneon’s pug, and how at the end of it, Alissa Feneon awarded Junzo the prize, a mock diploma torn from the back page of a newspaper, an advertisement – aimed, presumably, at the families of military men – for a kind of indestructable Rayon sock.

    When the laughter stops, Yuji says, ‘I’ve had some bad news.’

    ‘Your father?’ begins Taro, cautiously.

    ‘No, no  . . .’

    ‘You mean,’ says Junzo, ‘someone’s given you a job?’