One Morning Like a Bird (21 page)

    ‘You think she wants to dance?’

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

    ‘It’s true.’

    ‘Don’t you like her?’

    ‘She seems nice.’

    ‘How old do you think she is?’

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

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

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

    ‘You think it was?’

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

    ‘I’m not sure what the Unit is.’

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

    ‘Ishihara?’

    ‘The general.’

    ‘The general?’

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

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

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

8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    ‘There is really no need,’ says Yuji.

    ‘He prizes loyalty,’ says Ota.

    ‘Loyalty?’

    ‘Surely you understood that much?’

    ‘Yes. Of course  . . .’

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

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

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

    ‘Yuji!’

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

9

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

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