The Pure Land

by Spence, Alan

  ‘Have you met Mister Rudyard Kipling?’ asked Lawrence.

  ‘If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. Now that’s great poetry!’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Yes, he visited Nagasaki some years ago. I met him at a reception in the Foreigners’ Club. Why do you ask?’

  ‘It’s just that I met him too. In fact, I interviewed him. And he was complaining about some of the changes, what he thought the too rapid modernisation.’

  ‘I seem to recall he hated the sight of Japanese men in western suits! He said perhaps their forebears had the right idea in turning the first Christian missionaries into beefsteak!’

  ‘A character indeed!’

  Without being summoned, Yuko had appeared, brought Lawrence’s hat and overcoat.

  ‘Arigato gozaimasu.’ He bowed.

  ‘Do itashimashite.’ She bowed lower.

  He turned to Glover again. ‘Did you also meet another writer, a Frenchman by the name of Pierre Loti?’

  ‘Once, I think, in passing. Why, did you meet him too?’

  ‘No, his sojourn in Nagasaki was before my time. I just wondered if your paths had crossed, that’s all. He wrote a rather successful novel called Madame Chrysanthème.’

  ‘I’d heard some talk of it. But I’m afraid I haven’t read novels since I was a boy. Adventure tales. Treasure Island. Robinson Crusoe.’

  ‘Fine books. I read them too! No, this Loti fellow was none too enamoured of the Japanese, and it shows in his writing. Yet it’s spawned a fashion for japonisme, japonaiserie. An American named Long has written a rather more sympathetic tale entitled Madame Butterfly, and that’s been dramatised and turned into an opera by Signor Puccini.’

  ‘As I said, I’m not a devotee of the opera.’

  ‘No, of course.’ Lawrence buttoned up his coat. ‘Forgive me. I’m just making small talk. Idle curiosity. But if I may, I’ll track down copies of these novels and send them to you with a recording from Madame Butterfly.’

  ‘You’re too kind,’ said Glover.

  ‘I’d be interested in what you make of them,’ said Lawrence. He was about to say more, changed his mind, made a comment instead about the house, how fine it was, what an excellent location.

  ‘Small talk indeed!’ said Glover. ‘But, yes, it’s a fine house, effectively bought and paid for by Mitsubishi, with a little help from Ito-san.’

  ‘The district is called Azabu?’

  ‘It is. We’re really in the country, Shiba Park. The only drawback is that we’re three miles from the Mitsubishi office at Marunouchi. Until recently I was still going there most days, but it was a devil of a journey by jinrikisha along these wretched rutted roads. Of course in this weather it would be out of the question.’

  ‘Six inches of snow on some of the roads.’

  ‘And in any case, I am no longer fit for the journey.’

  ‘Perhaps come the spring.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Lawrence was suddenly awkward, felt an almost unbearable weight in the words and in the silences between. They were discussing mortality, not discussing it.

  ‘My carriage should be waiting at the road-end,’ he said.

  ‘Godspeed on your own journey,’ said Glover, and they shook hands again.

  Yuko opened the door and the wind blew in a flurry of snow. She slammed it quick shut when the visitor had gone, then she ushered the old man into the living room, stoked the fire in the grate, and he sat staring into it, watching it flicker and glow.

  *

  It was still cold, though the snow had begun to clear, a few weeks later when Tomisaburo came to visit. Glover was fond of his son, was always glad to see him, but he regretted the stiffness and formality that seemed to characterise their dealings.

  Hana was her father’s daughter through and through, had inherited his feistiness and fire, knew how to banter with him, placate him, make him laugh. But with Tomi there was always that distance, a reserve.

  That damned journalist had touched on it, hit a raw nerve. He’d been happy to talk to the man, bask in the memory of it all. But the interview had tired him, left him irritated in ways he didn’t quite understand.

  Yuko had taken Tomisaburo’s coat and hat and he’d bowed to her, slightly awkward as he always was with young women. Now he sat in the armchair by the fire, facing his father, sipping his tea as the old man told him of the journalist’s visit, how it had unsettled him.

  ‘You probably told him too much,’ said Tomisaburo.

  ‘Aye,’ said Glover. ‘Right enough. He’ll likely be turning it into a lurid article for some scandal sheet!’ He laughed and it set him coughing, brought the jab of pain stabbing at his side. ‘Christ!’ he said. ‘If I can’t even have a laugh, there’s not much left.’

  ‘You should rest more,’ said Tomisaburo, anxious.

  ‘Ach!’ said his father. ‘I’ve an eternity of that ahead of me, one way or another. Now, what brings you to Tokyo?’

  Tomisaburo’s eyes brightened. ‘I wanted to see you, of course. But I also wanted to check a consignment of handmade paper, for the book.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Glover. ‘Your atlas.’

  ‘I have commissioned a few more artists, and the work is well under way. By my reckoning there are 558 species of fish in the waters around Kyushu, and the book will contain in excess of 800 illustrations, including drawings of shellfish and whales.’

  ‘Impressive!’ said Glover, meaning it. Then he couldn’t help adding, wry, ‘And of course you have Admiral Togo to thank for the progress of your project.’

  Tomisaburo looked bemused. ‘How so?’

  ‘It was his victory over the Russians that extended Japanese fishing grounds.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Tomisaburo, seriously. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how goes the fishing industry? How fares the Smokey Joe?’

  ‘Very well,’ said Tomisaburo, back on safer ground. ‘Another steam trawler is on its way from Aberdeen, and two more are being built in the Mitsubishi yard.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘And we are planning, as an experiment, to send shipments of fish to the markets in Osaka by the new railroad.’

  ‘If folk had listened to me,’ said Glover, ‘the railroad would have been built forty years ago!’

  The railtrack laid along the Bund, the engine roaring along in clouds of steam, the crowds waving, Glover sounding the whistle, firing his pistol in the air.

  ‘Perhaps the country was not ready, the time not right.’

  ‘Ach!’ said Glover. ‘You always did err on the side of caution!’

  Tomisaburo was tightlipped. ‘I am who I am, and what my life has made me.’

  ‘Have more tea for God’s sake!’ said Glover. ‘And tell me what else is happening in Nagasaki.’

  Tomisaburo unclenched a little. ‘I am hoping to be elected Chairman of the Nagasaki Golf Association,’ he said. ‘There are plans to open a public course at Unzen.’

  Glover laughed. ‘I mind hacking my way round the course on the clifftop at Stonehaven! I believe there was a suggestion made that the game might catch on in Japan. But that was one development I didn’t foresee!’

  Flags in the wind off the North Sea. Unfinished business.

  ‘The International Club is flourishing,’ said Tomisaburo, with a kind of hesitant pride. ‘I am on the committee.’

  ‘You are a busy lad,’ said Glover.

  ‘We recently held a meeting to inaugurate our new meeting rooms. And you’ll never guess where they’re located.’

  ‘In Maruyama,’ said Glover, ‘in the flower quarter.’

  ‘No,’ said Tomisaburo, patient. ‘In Dejima.’

  ‘Dejima!’ said Glover. ‘Now that is appropriate!’

  His younger self, all gauche and eager. The mob across the bridge, smashed windows. The hot night. That first young girl.

  ‘It is indeed,’ said Tomisaburo. ‘Singularly so! There were seventy-six members at th
e meeting, Japanese alongside Americans and Europeans, even Russians and Chinese.’

  ‘You do surprise me. Perhaps there really is hope for the future.’

  ‘That’s why the club exists,’ said Tomisaburo, serious again, ‘to foster that hope through the bonds of friendship and understanding.’

  ‘A noble goal.’

  ‘It really was a splendid evening.’ Tomisaburo warmed to the telling. ‘The Mayor was presiding, and the Governor was present, as was the American Consul. And yet there was no undue formality to the proceedings, and an excellent meal progressed in an atmosphere of conviviality throughout.’

  Glover laughed again. ‘There are times, Tomi, when you sound like the perfect English gentleman!’

  Tomisaburo looked confused by the remark. ‘Indeed,’ he said, and fell silent.

  Glover knew it had not been easy for the boy. His years at school, Gakushuin, had been troubled. The other boys, sons of the aristocracy, had shunned him, called him a half-caste. More than once he’d come home battered and bloodied, but he’d borne it, stoical, retreated into that carapace, that hard protective shell, withdrawn to somewhere inside himself.

  I am who I am, and what my life has made me.

  ‘The irony is,’ continued Tomisaburo after some time, ‘many of the English gentlemen with whom I’ve had dealings regard me as a little Jap upstart with ideas above his station.’

  ‘Worst of both worlds,’ said Glover, suddenly feeling the weight of it all.

  Again they sat in silence. The fire sputtered in the grate.

  ‘You know,’ said Tomisaburo, ‘I am ujiko, parishioner of Suwa Shrine. This is a status not granted to outsiders, foreigners. So at least in that one respect I am wholly Japanese.’

  ‘I know Suwa Shrine,’ said Glover. ‘Do they still have the white horse, for the gods to ride on?’

  ‘They do.’

  Riding out past the shrine, on his way to see Maki. The boy awed, terrified by the horse, by the terrible gaijin, come to change his world.

  ‘What do you think of such things?’ asked Tomisaburo, tentative.

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Shrines. White horses. The gods.’

  ‘Religion?’

  ‘Religion, philosophy, superstition, call it what you will. We never discussed such matters.’

  ‘No.’ He gave it some thought. ‘I suppose I inherited a certain reticence from my own father, God rest him.’

  ‘And you also inherited his faith?’

  ‘I suppose I did. A grim northern fatalism! I may have spent my life defying it or ignoring it, but it’s there nevertheless, a bedrock.’

  ‘Was it never shaken by the theories of Mister Darwin?’

  ‘I never troubled to give them a great deal of thought.’

  ‘I find his ideas interesting.’

  ‘The biologist speaks!’

  ‘And you know, from a Shinto point of view, or Buddhist for that matter, there is no conflict with these ideas. Shinto has an inherent animism, a sense that everything has a soul, and the soul transmigrates. Buddhism already recognises the idea of evolution, through reincarnation. It’s only the Judaeo-Christian tradition that has a problem.’

  ‘So you believe in this … reincarnation, that we live many lives?’

  ‘I try to keep an open mind, and live from moment to moment as best I can.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Glover, ‘we’ve never discussed such things.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or much else, for that matter.’

  ‘You were a busy man.’

  ‘And now I’m an old man, a sick man, and soon I’ll be a dead man.’

  ‘It comes to us all, father.’

  ‘Too damn soon.’ He coughed and the spasm shook him, the pain so sharp a stab he cried out, choked, gulped in air. Tomisaburo called for Yuko, who was already on her way, bringing water, a whole jug of it; she poured a glass and Glover swigged it, held it out for a refill, his hand shaking; he was red-faced and sweating, Yuko dabbed his forehead with a cloth, said to Tomisaburo in Japanese that his father was tired and needed to rest, that he was grateful for the visit, but perhaps she could humbly and respectfully suggest it was time to leave.

  He nodded, bowed. Glover waved a hand, struggled to speak.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ he said. ‘The attacks get worse.’ He drew breath. ‘They come quicker.’

  Tomisaburo was anxious. ‘Maybe you should go to hospital.’ He darted a glance at Yuko for confirmation, support. She looked away.

  Again Glover waved a hand, grimaced, managed to speak. ‘Nothing they can do.’ He concentrated hard. The worst of it passed. ‘When the time comes I want it to be here, tended by this ministering angel.’

  Yuko didn’t understand completely, but she got the gist of it. She put a hand on Glover’s arm, turned and left the room, quickly.

  Glover got to his feet, shaky but taking charge again.

  ‘It was good to see you, Tomi. Good to talk to you.’ He reached across and they shook hands.

  ‘I’ll come again,’ said Tomisaburo. ‘Next month.’

  Glover nodded but the look in his eyes held a certainty, a foreknowledge. ‘Give my love to Waka, and to Hana and the children when you see them.’ He squeezed his son’s hand, said ‘Ach!’ and hugged him, something he hadn’t done since Tomi was a child. And Tomisaburo the man looked startled, dumbfounded.

  ‘We should have talked more,’ said Glover.

  ‘Hai,’ said Tomisaburo. ‘Yes.’

  Glover crossed the room, took down the short samurai sword in its sheath, turned and held it out, in both hands.

  ‘I’d like you to have this.’

  ‘But this …’ said Tomisaburo. ‘This is … It’s …’

  ‘I know,’ said Glover. ‘Please.’ And he bowed, stepped forward, held out the sword again. And Tomisaburo, caught in the ritual formality of the moment, could do nothing other than respond, bow, take the sword.

  In his eyes Glover saw for an instant something of the boy’s mother, just a glimmer, then gone.

  ‘Ach, son,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I just am.’

  Tomisaburo bowed again, touched the sword to his forehead.

  *

  He was burning up. The pain seared through him, racked and tore, beyond bearing. He sweated and shook, smelled rank, his nightshirt stuck to him, drenched. Was this it? Had he died and gone to hell? The minister had ranted about it in the dank grey kirk, in the cold north, a lifetime ago. Lead us not into temptation. Deliver us from evil. Hellfire and damnation. The wages of sin. He was on fire, fevered, he writhed and kicked off the bedclothes, tugged at his throat. Needed to cool down, douse the flames. He imagined diving into cool water, saw himself a wee skinny boy near naked diving off the bridge, arms flailing legs pedalling the air to splash and plunge into the cold Don, go under and come up gasping, exhilarated, shake the water off like a mongrel tike, run and clamber back up the bridge to dive in again for the sheer joy of it, the sensation. And himself as a young lad, about the town with his cronies, drunk and climbing onto the parapet, balanced there, and the young fellow Robertson keeling over, falling in, himself not thinking, jumping in to drag him out. And win the keystane o’ the brig. Dripping wet his clothes soaked boots the lot waterlogged. Robertson. Was he still alive? An old man with grown-up family, grandchildren. Dear God, Annie. Those blonde curls, the bonnet, a summer night at Brig o’ Balgownie. Bonnie lassie O. Down among the dunes, a long spurt into nothing, Houghmagandie. Fuck. Annie’s white hanky smeared with red. Fuck. No. Ah, Tam. Ah, Tam. Thou’ll get thy fairin. In hell they’ll roast thee like a herrin. Burning turned on a spit. No not this.

  He sat up in bed, he was here, it was night, the wee small hours. Yes. There was water in a jug at his bedside. Yuko, God bless her, a treasure. His hands trembled as he picked up the jug, slugged straight from the lip of it, spilled as much as he swigged, but the drouth was killing him, he had to swallow
it down, drank and drank to slake this thirst, slopped and swilled, wet his face his shirt the bedclothes, drank. He was here in his own home, his house. Azabu. Shiba Park. Tokyo. Japan. As a boy at school, the solid granite Gymnasium in the Chanonry, he’d written his name and address in his exercise book, inside the front cover. Thomas Blake Glover. The Coastguard Station. Bridge of Don. Aberdeen. Scotland. Britain. Europe. The Northern Hemisphere. The Earth. The Solar System. The Universe. Spinning the globe in the shipbroker’s office, putting his finger on Japan. Here be dragons. A land that floweth with milk and honey. A bit far, is it no?

  Now he shivered, the water he’d spilled started to chill him. And the cold feared him more than the fire, the thought of it, descending into endless dark, buried in the cold hard ground. The earth. Without form and void. Nothing. A tiger, he’d burned bright. Now the fire would be doused, extinguished. Tomi had said we continued. As long as the red earth rolls. To end for good, be finished, be nothing. To go forever to heaven or hell, a dream or a nightmare everlasting. To keep coming back again and again. He would find out soon enough. He would ken.

  Now he was really shivering. It was winter. Out there the earth was frozen, the trees were bare. Azabu. Shiba Park. Tokyo. Kyushu. Japan. Asia. The Northern Hemisphere. The Earth. The Solar System. The Universe. The Void. His nightshirt was wet. He curled under the covers, cooried down to get warm again. He wanted to sleep, feared if he did he might not wake up. He lay still, huddled, felt the warmth come back to his core. Atsuka! Old Ken Mackenzie had laughed at that. And Ken too was long gone, dead and buried, and Walsh, in some accident after he’d gone home. A rogue. The pleasure quarter, soaking in the hot tub. The screen doors opening.

  Sono.

  Och, lassie, so young so young, and the wee bairn that never lived at all. He didn’t want to think about this, about any of it, he just wanted to sleep, but it came at him, battered him. Kagoshima, the town bombarded, laid waste, fire raging along the waterfront, the smell of burning, the dead bodies so much meat. Sono. A wisp of smoke as he looked back. The pain tore at him again, again, now there was a steady throb that wouldn’t stop, an ache that was constant, and at intervals the jab and jab of real deep pain, sharp point of a blade twisting. He had given Matsuo’s sword to Tomisaburo, seen the look in his eyes, the look that had minded Glover of Maki, gone these long years but still there, like that, in the memory. Maki. Sound of the samisen. Nights at the Sakura, the sheer intensity of it, fire of the flesh, never so fully alive before or since. Lying in her arms, sated utterly, breathing in the smell of her, hearing her laugh. The stories she’d told him, haltingly. One hand clapping. Cutting the cat in half. The cliff-edge and the tiger chasing, the tiger waiting, the sweet taste of the strawberry. The tiger roared. Burning bright. Hot ginger and dynamite. Nothing but that at night. Back in Nagasaki where the fellers chew tabacky and the women, the women. He felt another pang, saw Tsuru his goodwife all these years, the young woman she was, grown old with him and gone. Turned to dust in Sakamoto. He would join her there when his time came, soon. Drifting into sleep, just letting go.