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Authors: Francis King

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Miss Morita laid out on the table the map that she had taken out of her bag. ‘It is rather difficult to find,’ she told us. ‘Out of the way. First we drive to Hôrinji – well-known Shinto shrine. From there we go to Matsuno-o Shrine.’ With a forefinger, the cuticle ragged around the nail, she traced the route on the map over which all three of us had bowed our heads. ‘We do not visit shrine today. But later we must visit for the famous Rice Planting Festival. July twenty-three,’ she added with her
extraordinarily
exact memory for such details. ‘Saihôji is south-west of Matsuno-o Shrine.’ Again she pointed. ‘Here. The garden of the temple is famous all over the world. Now many people call it not Saihôji but Kokedera. Kokedera means Moss Temple. This garden is famous for moss – many kinds of moss,
hundreds
. This is the best time to visit, rainy season.’

Without my noticing Laura had drifted away from us. Arms akimbo, she was staring out of the window at the rain. She often stared out like that, transfixed by its relentlessness. She turned. ‘It’s raining. Always this bloody rain.’

‘That’s why it’s called the rainy season. Let’s make the best of it.’

‘You must see Kokedera in rainy season,’ Miss Morita
intervened
. When most people say that you must see this or that, it is no more than a recommendation. But when Miss Morita said it, the words, though uttered in a voice of cotton-wool softness and deadness, nonetheless carried an inflexible authority.

Laura moved away from the window. ‘Oh, all right. Then let’s get going.’

‘Excuse me.’ Miss Morita pointed at Laura’s shoes. ‘Such shoes are not good for Moss Temple. The moss is very damp, everywhere is damp.’

‘Then I’d better change them, hadn’t I?’

‘That is good idea.’

As we threaded our way down a narrow, winding lane, and then bumped over an even narrower dirt track, branches
rattling against the sides of the Cadillac and mud spattering not merely its body but from time to time even the windshield, Laura became increasingly exasperated.

‘Are you sure we’re going the right way?’

‘Yes. Sure.’

‘But it seemed so much shorter on the map.’

‘In Japan every journey seems shorter on map.’ Was Miss Morita merely stating a self-evident truth or was she being
jocular
? As so often, there was no way of knowing.

When I last visited Kokedera, during the rainy season almost half a century later, it was crowded with people wearing
raincoats
and carrying umbrellas. But fifty years ago it was totally empty, but for a tall, solitary man – a German, I guessed – in a long black, belted raincoat and a black homburg hat, a black umbrella held above him. He would from time to time place the umbrella, unfolded, on the ground beside him while he took yet another photograph with the Rolleiflex dangling round his neck. As we passed him, he nodded briefly at us, and I then said, ‘Good morning.’ I received no reply.

On our stepping out of the car, Laura struggled to open her dark green umbrella with its amber handle. It had once cost me a lot of money when I had bought it for her as a birthday present at James Smith. ‘Please,’ Miss Morita said. She took it from her and, with a small grimace, briskly unfurled it. She smiled and handed it back.

Laura said nothing.

The light was extraordinary, as though reflected off the moss stretching in all directions. Drops of water fell in heavy globules from the branches of the trees. Soundlessly the moss welcomed them. Miss Morita began to tell us about the priest Musô Kokushi who, in the twelfth – or was it the thirteenth? –
century
had designed it. ‘A kind of male, Japanese Vita
Sackville-West
,’ I said fatuously. I wished that she would keep quiet.

Suddenly Laura, who was walking a few steps ahead, no doubt in an effort not to have to listen to this lecture, turned and faced us. She lowered her open umbrella: ‘I’m afraid I’ve had enough of this. I can’t take any more rain and I can’t take any more moss.’ I half expected her to go on: ‘And I can’t take any more of these lectures.’

‘But you must complete circuit,’ Miss Morita protested. ‘Everyone completes circuit. We have done only half. Please!’

Laura’s only response was, ‘I’ll wait for you in the car.’ She began to march back the way that we had come. Then, no doubt repenting of her rudeness, she turned: ‘I’m sorry. So sorry. Don’t pay any attention to me. Enjoy yourselves. I have a copy of
The
Times
in the car. More than a week old but never mind.’

‘She is making a mistake,’ Miss Morita said, looking after her, head tilted to one side. ‘I am sorry.’

‘There’s nothing for you to be sorry about. This incessant rain is getting her down.’

‘Getting her down?’

‘Depressing her. She hates it. But I love it,’ I added.

‘Maybe in a previous life you were Japanese man.’ She said it as though she really believed that this might be possible. ‘You understand us. We are different – and, like us, you are also different. Not like most Western men.’ She shook her head. ‘No, no. Not at all.’

I wanted silence, so that I could not merely hear the birds but also listen in vain for the sound of those globules of water falling endlessly down on to the iridescent moss. Fortunately, perhaps at last sensing this, Miss Morita stopped her endless chatter, as she stepped out beside me in her cumbersome,
flat-heeled
shoes – sensible shoes, my mother would have called them – a garish paper umbrella open above a grey felt hat with jauntily upturned brim.

Then all at once she halted and her hand shot out to my arm. She grasped it. ‘Look!’ she whispered. ‘
Look
!’ She raised her umbrella with her other arm and pointed. ‘Frog.’ Underneath a cherry tree, its bole black with rain, I eventually discerned, screwing up my eyes, a small frog motionless but for a constant throbbing in its swollen throat. It seemed to be
staring
at us with eyes made of jet beads. Its body, like the bodies of those lizards that would now rest motionless in our
boarding
-house bedroom and now scuttle up its walls, seemed to be encrusted with emeralds.

We stood there looking at it for what must have been almost a minute. All that time her hand rested on my arm, and all that time I became increasingly conscious of it. The gentle pressure
had an astonishingly disconcerting and yet also astonishingly transforming effect on me. I was not in the least excited or aroused by the contact, as I might have been from a similar contact with a woman sexually desirable, as Miss Morita
certainly
was not. But it transmitted to me a feeling of
overwhelming
tranquillity and, yes, at the same time of the joy that I have so rarely and so fleetingly felt in the course of my life.

The frog gave one leap, a second, a third, before vanishing from sight. I let out an involuntary gasp and realised that I had been holding my breath for several seconds before that.

Miss Morita removed her hand.

We walked on, once more in silence.

‘Did I miss a lot?’ Laura asked, as I opened the car door for Miss Morita to enter.

‘Only more of the same. But that light – and that stillness! I’ve never experienced anything like it.’

Laura put a hand to the ignition. The engine thudded into life. The whole vast car shook, a prehistoric beast arousing itself from slumber.

I am sealed in a tube. I might be a mummy.

‘What sort of music would you like?’ the handsome, tall woman with the thin lips asked me before I entered it.

‘What can you offer?’

‘Oh, almost anything.’ She put her head on one side and surveyed me. ‘You wouldn’t opt for pop, would you? Jazz? Yes, you might opt for that. Or Gilbert and Sullivan. We have a nice CD of
The
Mikado
.’

‘No. Not that. Mozart perhaps?’

‘Mozart it is.’

I lie listening to
Eine
Kleine
Nachtmusik.
I’ve heard it so often before, and now I’ve tired of its elegant, whimsical
sweetness
. It doesn’t in any way distract me from my panic. Sealed with me inside the tube an invisible wild beast is emitting weird grunts, whirrings, and burps. The noises seem to be part of me, the symptoms of some violent digestive upset. I begin to count the seconds – no, not so fast, too fast, slower, slower! – to distract myself.

‘Well, there you are! It wasn’t so bad, was it?’ Perhaps she says that to every patient that she imprisons in the tube. Perhaps she realised from the beginning how nervous I was.

‘It was even worse than I’d expected.’ I laugh. I want her to think that I’m joking. But I’m not.

It is not the usual effervescent, sweet-natured black porter (from Ghana, I have by now learned) who fetches me but an elderly man with sagging jowls and cheeks, who hums tonelessly to himself as he pushes the creaking wheelchair down the long, strangely empty corridor.

Suddenly he says, ‘I wonder what we can expect now?’

I am puzzled. Is he referring to the result of the thallium scan that I’ve just endured? To my future health – or lack of it?

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, there may be other explosions. I’d not be surprised. That’s why we’re on red alert.’

‘Red alert? I don’t get you.’

Suddenly galvanised out of his lethargy, he tells me the news. While I was imprisoned in my tube and that handsome, tall woman with the thin lips was monitoring its progress, three bombs had exploded in London. At any moment casualties might arrive.

Even the most moribund people in the ward are excited. They are all now staring up at the individual television sets above their heads, from time to time swivelling round to make some comment to a neighbour.

The red-faced, pot-bellied man whom I so much hate
suddenly
announces to everyone, ‘They were bloody fools ever to let them into this country. Enoch Powell was right. Rivers of blood. That’s what he said was coming. Too bloody right he was. We should boot the whole bloody lot of them back where they came from.’

I pick up my copy of
The
Tales
of
Genji
, already read twice, in an effort to escape from a fizzing excitement that is as little to my taste as a tumbler of gaseous root beer.

As usual, Dr Szymanovski is already with me before my little eye has detected his approach. ‘I’m sorry to have to ask this of you. But you’ve just had your last test and so it’s not really essential for you to remain here. We can always bring you back in an ambulance when we want to monitor you.’ I am puzzled. What’s all this about? Then it comes to me. Why have I been so slow and obtuse? ‘We haven’t yet had to take in any
casualties
of the bombings. But we might have to – any moment now. The thing is we have to clear this ward – and some other wards. I’m sorry. Would you very much mind…?’

So far from minding, I feel a surge of relief, as though I were a death row prisoner suddenly brought his reprieve.

‘Yes, that’s fine.’ And it is fine. ‘Shall I get up and dress now?’

He nods. ‘The sooner, the better. But take your time. No immediate hurry.’

I inch out of bed and open my locker for the clothes that have been getting more and more creased as the days have passed. I pull out a vest, and with it the trousers of my
dark-blue
suit fall out on to the floor. I stoop. Suddenly I feel giddy.
My blood pressure must have suddenly slumped, a side effect of my battery of pills. I lie back on the bed, the vest in one hand.

I twist my head round and look at the red-faced booby opposite. Dr Szymanovski is standing over him. I can’t hear everything that he is saying, but it must be similar to what he has said to me.

Then I hear the booby all too clearly as he shouts in disgust, ‘Bloody hell! I’m bloody ill!’

With a strange hyperaesthesia I can hear every word of Dr Szymanovski’s cold, disgusted reply, ‘I think that many of the casualties are likely to be iller than you are.’

‘Oh, OK, OK! Anything to oblige! Whatever you say, Doc!’ Muttering to himself, his face flushed, he swings out of the bed legs alarmingly thin for a man of his bulk.

Down in the crowded atrium of the hospital I wait for Laura, whom I managed to get on her mobile while she was walking in the park. Because there is nowhere to sit, I lean against a wall. I am still feeling dizzy. An ashen-faced, middle-aged man in a tattered dressing gown, leaning beside me, asks, ‘Do you think it’s OK if I smoke a fag? It might revive me.’ He has already told me that a mate of his is coming to fetch him.

‘I’ve no objection. But I don’t know about the authorities.’

He lights up. Cupping the cigarette in his palm, he draws heavily on it three or four times and then begins to cough. A porter hurries over.

‘Sorry, sir! Sorry! Strictly
verboten!
’ He wags a finger.

‘I can hardly go and stand outside.’

‘Well, then I’m afraid … Sorry, sir. Regulations.’

The old man flings down the cigarette on to the marble floor and lunges out to stamp on it, with the same ferocity that Laura used to bring to her stamping on the cockroaches back in Japan.

All those years ago the road out to Lake Biwa was not a crowded thoroughfare with constant traffic jams. Few people other than the rich had private cars, and buses, other than long-distant ones, were infrequent. Our journey was therefore leisurely and peaceful, with Mark asleep beside me in the back, and Miss Morita, beside Laura in front, mercifully breaking the silence only to sneeze violently into a lace-fringed handkerchief kept constantly at the ready in one hand, and to exclaim, ‘Sorry, sorry!’ She always had hay fever at this time of year, she had explained to us.

When we reached the lake, sunlight was slanting across it from above the mountains. Every sparkle stabbed at my eyes. In the hurry of our departure, I had foolishly, unlike Laura and Miss Morita, forgotten to bring my sunglasses. Now, when I complained of the glare, Miss Morita at once pulled off hers and offered them to me. I refused. ‘Please, please! I do not need them,’ she insisted. Eventually I gave in. Because they were too small for me, I had to wear them tilted uncomfortably at an angle.

Laura and I decided to swim at once. When we asked Miss Morita if she would be joining us, she put her hand over her mouth and began to giggle, as at the same time she violently shook her head. ‘No, no! Never! I will stay with baby.’ We might have been asking her to do something tempting but
disreputable
. A French couple, seated at a nearby table of the
lakeside
cafe to which Miss Morita had steered us – Laura had wanted a different, more isolated one – had already offered to look after Mark. Since they also had a baby in a carrier cot, we should have preferred to leave Mark with them. But Miss Morita was already lifting his cot to place it on a chair next to hers. She put her face close to his and half-sang what sounded like ‘Ting-ting-ting! Ting-ting-ting!’ Mark let out a scream.

‘Do you think that she’ll be all right with him?’ Laura asked as, side by side, we entered the water.

‘Yes, of course. She’s very responsible. I just hope this water will be all right.’ It was warm and slimy as I waded farther into it.

‘Miss Morita said it was quite OK. And that Frenchman swam in it.’ She looked about her. ‘And there are other bathers.’

‘Very few.’

Laura, a poor swimmer, floated near to the shore. I swam out and out, with an exhilarating sense of freedom. There was a rowing boat in the middle of the lake, with two men fishing from it. Its insubstantial image floated double, totally
motionless
above and below the still water. I thought that I might make that my destination but then gave up. I had not swum for two or three years and my arms, back and neck had suddenly begun to ache. Mrs Kawasaki had once told me that her son had planned to build a pool in the garden of the house, but that then the war had broken out and he had gone off to do his military service. Now that, the rainy season over, the weather was inexorably hotting up day by day, I wished that his plan had not failed to come to fruition.

As I began to dry myself vigorously, I realised that Miss Morita, seated with one hand placed on the edge of the cot as though to assert her possession, was squinting at me, her eyes screwed up because of her insistence that I should take her dark glasses. She leaned forward, both hands now clasped between her knees. ‘You are an athlete.’

Laura laughed derisively. ‘That’s something he certainly is not. He’s a weedy intellectual.’ Later she told me, ‘I wanted to add that the only sort of athlete that you were was a sexual one.’

Miss Morita clapped both hands over her mouth and was convulsed by one sneeze and then another. ‘Excuse me! Sorry! Very sorry!’ she cried out. Having dabbed at her nose with a handkerchief pulled from a pocket, she went on, ‘Dr Anson has a copy of a statue of Greek athlete. It is called Discobulus. A little like you, I think.’

Laura again laughed, even more derisively. ‘If he were to pick up a discus, he’d probably fall over with the weight of it.’

I felt miffed but said nothing. In sympathy, Miss Morita
sought my gaze and then gave what was clearly intended as a comforting smile.

All at once, usually so undemanding, Mark began to bellow.

‘Oh, hell. I’d better feed him.’ Laura turned to me. ‘Where did you put the bag?’

‘In the shade. Over there.’

Miss Morita at once leapt to her feet to fetch it.

The sushi and the tempura that we had ordered to follow it were both excellent. It was rare in those days to drink sake other than warmed. But on our behalf Miss Morita had insisted to the waiter that we should have ours chilled, even though she had previously admonished us that, to enjoy it at its best, warming was essential.

Suddenly Laura cried out in horror, ‘What are you doing?’

Daintily holding a ball of rice from the sushi between her thumb and forefinger, Miss Morita was feeding it to Mark. She looked up startled. ‘Sushi is fine for a baby. No problem. In Japan –’

‘I don’t care what is fine in Japan. It would certainly not be fine in England. Do please,
please
stop feeding him. Please don’t give him anything, anything at all. I’ve already given him his baby food. That’s enough.’

Miss Morita hung her head. ‘Sorry. I am very sorry. In Japan –’

‘Yes, I know, I know! In Japan, yes. But not anywhere else in the world.’

‘Sorry.’

By the time that we had finished our lunch, the sun was low, a huge orange disc just above the serrated crest of a mountain to the west.

I jumped to my feet. ‘I need a walk after all that food.’

‘And I need a zizz.’

I began to walk away. Then I heard from behind me: ‘I am coming. I am coming with you. Wait! Please wait!’

I halted, frowning. Behind Miss Morita I could see Laura. Her head was back against the chair, her straw hat tilted so far forward that most of her face was invisible. Her bare legs were stretched out ahead of her. Too short and with muscular calves, they were her one physical feature that I never found attractive. When, on our arrival, the three of us had walked together down
to the cafe by the lakeshore, I had thought, with the surprise of a first discovery, how beautiful Miss Morita’s legs were in comparison.

‘Maybe you do not know why this lake is called Biwa. This lake is shaped like a
biwa
, a musical instrument maybe like your lute. Did you know – it is a little larger than the Lake Geneva in Switzerland? A volcano made the lake – some say in a single night. Maybe? Some say no…’

Remorselessly she went on and on. But, as I watched a small tourist steamer making what was, as Miss Morita now
interrupted
her lecture to tell me, a circuit of the ‘famous’ (her word) Eight Views of the lake, I found that I had become no more aware of that quiet, insistent voice than of the increasing whirr and thump from a factory – processor of dried fish, Miss Morita had broken off to tell me – in a crook of the wayward shore.

As we approached Laura on our return, she gave a little grunt, jerked up, opened her eyes, and stared at us as though not recognising who we were. She pushed up her hat, revealing a red line on her glistening forehead. ‘Oh, there you are!’ After a look at her watch, she added crossly, ‘You’ve been gone an age.’

‘Sorry. Miss Morita wanted to show me one of the eight famous views and we had to walk longer than I had imagined.’

‘What was the view?’

‘I think it’s called “Sails Returning to Yabase”. Am I right, Miss Morita?’

‘Yes. Yes, that is right.’

‘Unfortunately there were no sails. But Yabase was there. Very beautiful.’

‘Sorry. But this is not the season for that view. We will come another time.’

‘That’ll be a treat to look forward to.’ Laura scratched at a leg. Then she looked down and gave a little scream. ‘Oh, my God, look at my legs! Look at these bites. What
are
they?’

‘Mosquitoes, I think,’ Miss Morita said indifferently. ‘Such bites are common in the summer by the lake. Maybe you should have put on cream – or worn stockings.’

‘Mosquitoes! Oh, my God! Do you think they can give me malaria?’ Laura jumped up and peered into the cot.

‘In Japan we do not have malaria,’ Miss Morita said firmly.

‘Thank God they didn’t get at Mark.’ Laura straightened. Then she stooped again, and, even more frenziedly than before, scratched and scratched. A bead of blood slowly swelled and began to darken where her long nails had lacerated the skin.

‘My mother always say that best cure for mosquito bites is to soak with Japanese green tea. I am not sure. She say that tea must be specially strong.’

Laura paid no attention. She began to gather up her belongings.

‘We haven’t yet paid,’ I reminded her.

She sighed. Then she held out her bag. ‘Pay. There should be lots of money in there. I went to the bank yesterday.’

I paid and returned.

‘You drive!’ Laura held out the keys to me.

‘Really? You always say that it’s more tiring to sit in a car in which I’m driving than to drive yourself.’

‘Do I? Well, I don’t feel that today. This heat seems to have drained me of all energy.’

‘It is not so hot here as in Kyoto,’ Miss Morita interjected. ‘Many people come to Lake Biwa to be cool.’

‘That suggests that they can’t be very bright.’ Laura, who was carrying the cot with Mark in it, indicated the rear door beside her with the toe of her shoe. ‘Open that, would you? I’ll go in the back with Mark and you can go in front with Miss Morita.’

‘But I can go in the back with Mark-chan, no problem,’ Miss Morita protested.

‘I think it’ll be best if I’m with him.’

‘As you wish.’

Having seated herself, Miss Morita pulled off her straw hat and rested it on her knees. She sighed in contentment. Her hair, damp with sweat, was stuck, like the tendrils of a creeper, to her wide forehead, ‘On the way home we can stop at Ishiyama.’ She turned to me. ‘Maybe you know that Ishiyama is famous for its Ishiyamadera Temple – Stony Hill in English. In the temple there is a building called Genji-no-ma. You have heard of it?’ She turned her head to address Laura, who made no reply. ‘You know of course of
Genji
Monogatari

Tales of Genji
?’

When Laura made no response, I put in, ‘Oh, yes, of course
we do. There’s a wonderful English translation by someone called Arthur Waley.’

‘The author is Murasaki Shikibu. She was born nine-
seven-five
, I think, and died maybe ten-thirty-one, ten-thirty-two. She write her famous book at the temple. Soon we make detour. I will tell you.’

‘No. I’m sorry, Miss Morita. We must leave that detour for another time. I think that I must get Mark home.’ At that Laura broke off to exclaim, ‘Oh, hell! He’s been sick all over me.’

I glanced over my shoulder – something always hazardous, however brief the glance, if I am driving. Mark’s face looked grey against her sunburned arm. Puke glistened momentarily on his chin, until Laura briskly wiped it away with a
handkerchief
. I turned back to the road ahead.

Then I heard: ‘It was that sushi! He’s too young for rice. I knew, knew that it would only upset him!’

In consternation Miss Morita wailed, ‘Oh, I am sorry, sorry, sorry! But in Japan we think that for baby –’

‘I don’t care what you think in Japan. Please, please never feed him anything.’ There was silence. Then Laura added, ‘Ever, ever again.’

When, having left Miss Morita off at her mother’s house, we were getting out of the car, Laura, who was still inside, lifted the cot to pass it to me, standing by the open rear door.

‘Oh, Christ! He’s done it again. More rice from that wretched sushi. What an idiot that woman is. One can only hope she never has a baby of her own.’

The next day the bead of blood on her leg had become a scab. The day after that the scab was surrounded by an inflamed ridge of tissue. On the third day she was running a temperature.

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