He started to see in his head the time they had sailed close to the port of Wonsan. They had heard the sounds of battle and seen the flare of exploding bombs blossoming like great red flowers along the Korean coastline. He remembered how the captain had given the wheel of the boat to Orlov and come out to stand at the rail of the boat, staring at the balls of flame as they unfolded into the sky. The thud of each explosion had reached them moments after they saw the first flash of fire. The captain’s face had been completely impassive, empty of expression.
The room seemed to be rocking back and forth like a boat in high seas. Jun’s feet were numb, and his legs felt like lead. In the end, with a soft groan, he slid down the wall into a sitting position. The freezing water rose around his chest, drenching his clothes. He was desperately thirsty, but didn’t dare to try drinking the black water in which he was sitting.
Random rags of memory or dream now floated through his mind. He could see coloured patterns and shapes like the ones in the glass kaleidoscope that he and his sister Kiyo had found in the garden of an abandoned house the day after the Russians declared war. They had carried the kaleidoscope with them on the handcart as they fled south. Exploding patterns of green and blue and purple flared from the centre of the kaleidoscope as they held it up to the light.
The darkness had soaked into the core of his being. His mind was numb. And when, a very long time later, the silhouette of a human figure appeared in a rectangle of light on the other side of the room, he could not tell at first whether it was real or a dream.
‘Come here!’ barked Goto.
Jun struggled to his feet and waded across the flooded room to his gaoler, who hauled him out into the glaring light of the white passageway.
‘Had enough? Ready to do some talking now?’
But Jun’s mind could no longer make sense of the words. All he could do was try desperately to force back the tears that he could feel rising in his throat.
‘I don’t know anything. I don’t know anything,’ he whispered.
The American colonel and the other soldier who had driven him from the station were waiting for him in the grand hallway of the mansion. The colonel had his pistol in one hand, and the soldier had a rope, which he tied around Jun’s arms. Water dripped from Jun’s clothes, leaving small pools on the slippery tiled floor of the hallway.
‘OK. Let’s get this over with,’ said Goto impatiently.
Beyond the front steps of the mansion, the garden was dark and freezing. There was a faint line of pink on the horizon, but Jun couldn’t tell whether it was the dregs of sunset or the moment before dawn. Outside on the grass, beneath a tall cedar tree, stood a stone lantern. The round holes in its sides looked like huge, dark eyes. The colonel walked towards it, with Jun and the two soldiers following.
‘Kneel down,’ said Goto.
Jun kneeled on the grass, which was dry and hard. He was shaking with cold. He could feel the muzzle of a pistol pressed against the back of his head.
‘You’ve had your chance, Kamiya. This is it. We know you’ve been lying all along. The Soviets sent you, didn’t they? We know you’re working for them. You have sixty seconds left to tell us the truth.’
But Jun’s voice no longer made sounds. His body and mind were empty. He shut his eyes, and heard a click as the safety catch on the pistol was released.
After Jun’s father had died, his mother had created a little shrine on a shelf in the main room, next to the cupboard where they kept the bedding. Every now and again, he would find her kneeling in front of it, eyes closed, chanting a Buddhist mantra over and over. When he asked her what the mantra meant, she said she had no idea. ‘It’s just what priests say at funerals,’ she said. ‘You have to repeat it at least ten times.’
Now Jun started to recite that mantra in his head. Namu Amida Butsu. Namu Amida Butsu. Namu Amida Butsu. Ten times. Twenty times. Thirty times. Again and again. The words expanded, filling his head, until he wondered whether he had already crossed over into another world: a world beyond life. He thought he could hear a choir of voices singing somewhere in the distance.
Then he heard a deep chuckle from above his head. The American colonel was laughing. The colonel said something to Goto, who dutifully echoed his laughter.
‘Well, quite the little hero, aren’t we?’ said Goto. And then, ‘Of course, there is another way out, you know. Wanna guess what that is? Nah, I think you’ve guessed already, haven’t you?’
And when Jun said nothing, he added, ‘You could work for us, you know. Young man with no identity, no family, speaks Russian, pal of Colonel Brodsky and all. We could probably make use of someone like you. Interested?’
Jun’s voice had not yet returned.
‘Of course,’ continued Goto, in tones of sweet reason, ‘you probably want to check the terms of your employment contract first. Quite right too. They go like this. You do exactly what you’re told. You don’t ask questions. You keep your eyes open and your mouth shut. And if you ever step out of line by as much as an inch, next time it won’t be a nice, clean bullet to the back of the skull. How’s that? Pretty decent offer, huh? What do you say?’
The pistol was still pressed against the back of Jun’s head.
‘I didn’t hear you,’ said Goto.
Very slowly and cautiously, Jun nodded.
‘OK. Get up,’ said Goto.
But Jun’s legs could no longer bear the weight of his body, so Goto and the other soldier draped his arms around their shoulders and half dragged, half carried him back into the big house.
It was not until a couple of days later — once they had kitted him out in a university student’s black uniform with brass buttons and had started him on his preliminary training — that Jun discovered who he was working for now.
CHAPTER 5
Elly Ruskin scooped the coagulated rice from yesterday’s dinner out of the bottom of the saucepan, stirred it into the leftover miso soup, and put the resulting gruel on the gas stove to boil. If Fergus had been home, she would have done something more elaborate: made an omelette or grilled some fish for breakfast. But he was away in Hiroshima, trying to learn more about the after-effects of the atomic bombing. Although Elly missed his company, she also rejoiced in the calm that descended when she had the house to herself, and could plan her day as she pleased. But today there was a task that had to be faced: Mother.
As the weather warmed, dawn was starting to arrive absurdly early, but Elly had lain in this morning, curled comfortably half asleep in her futon, luxuriating in a sense of relaxation after days of restless activity. By the time her breakfast was ready, the sun was high in the sky, and hazy light was streaming in rectangles through the paper screens. Elly tipped the gruel into an earthenware bowl, broke an egg into the mix, and carefully carried the bowl to the old wooden table in the middle of their untidy front room. Then she switched on the wireless, and a burst of big-band jazz from the Far East Network filled the morning.
There had been so much to do in the past few weeks. Until this month, Elly had never felt the need to keep a diary or appointment book, but now she had started one: just a series of jottings, really, in a tattered notebook that she had purloined from Fergus’ study. Skimming through its pages made her feel quite proud of what she had accomplished already, but daunted by the thought of all the tasks to come.
15 April — 12 p.m. — Keio Uni. That had been a lunch meeting with her friend Teruko, who was studying law and shared what she knew about the rules of adoption in Japan. Not much, as it turned out.
18 April — 3 p.m. — Fred Quincy, British Liaison Mission. Fred was the one British diplomat in Tokyo whom Elly knew reasonably well: a rotund, cheerful bachelor with a faint Welsh accent, said to have an eye for handsome Japanese boys. He was low in the diplomatic pecking order, but Elly had had hopes that he might be able to tell her how to go about getting British nationality for an adopted child. He proved frustratingly vague, though. Apparently he’d come across cases of British Comm
onwealth soldiers wanting to adopt Japanese children, but had never dealt with one like this before. Everyone seemed vague, in fact. There was no manual to follow, no convenient agency to consult.
24 April — Arrange lawyer and SEND LETTER TO OGIRI! It had taken her days to write that letter in her best formal Japanese, awkwardly asking if Ogiri Joji would consider being a sponsor for their adoption case. They needed someone with clout to vouch for their financial and moral standing — which seemed an embarrassing thing to have to ask from a person she barely knew. To her surprise, Mr Ogiri’s response was swift and positive. The businessman, it seemed, would be delighted to talk to them about their plans to adopt a child and to ‘render whatever assistance I can’, and had suggested a meeting in the lobby of the Imperial Hotel in early June, when Fergus would be back from an impending and long-planned trip to Okinawa.
Someday, years from now, Elly imagined, she would show this little diary to Maya, and tell their daughter the story of her adoption. The thought made her slightly dizzy with excitement, but also stirred gnawing anxieties about the venture on which she’d embarked. She and Fergus would love Maya totally and unconditionally. Of course they would. She was starting to love her already. But would Maya ever learn to love them?
30 April — Fergus out until after 2.30 a.m.! — That was just written in a fit of irritation. She would probably cross it out later, particularly if she ever wanted Maya to read her diary.
7 May — 11.30 a.m. — Elizabeth Saunders Home — Meet Matron at Oiso Station (north exit), and then, added below, Saw Maya again. She looked lonely. Maya had been playing with a doll in the garden of the home, surrounded by other children, yet somehow utterly solitary. Elly had longed to run across the lawn and enfold the child in her arms, but had been firmly instructed not to speak to her. It was still too early, they said. After some pleading from Elly, though, the matron had rather reluctantly given her a photo to keep. It showed a dozen infants, some of them babies barely old enough to sit unaided, lined up on the lawn, with Maya in the middle of the back row, frowning at the photographer from behind her tousled curls.
As she slurped her warm gruel, Elly gazed at the photo and imagined the little girl waking in her dormitory, in one of the spartan rows of white beds she had glimpsed through a half-open door. She could visualize the expression on Maya’s face as she was herded to the bathroom for a hasty wash, and then to prayers and breakfast in the refectory. The Japanese staff at the home seemed kind and dedicated, but the place was still an institution. Home, thought Elly — what strangely contrasting meanings we give to that word.
The scrubbed linoleum floors and antiseptic smell of the children’s home were a world away from the rickety two-storey house that she and Fergus shared, with its chaotic comfort and its pervasive odour of camphor wood and straw. They had decided before they married that they wanted to find an old-fashioned Japanese house, rather than a modern concrete block or something on one of those drearily uniform Occupation Force housing estates where so many of their non-Japanese friends lived.
They discovered this place almost by chance: perched on the lower slopes of Atago-yama, the strange volcanic bluff that rose from the midst of the city. On the summit above stood the transmission towers of Tokyo’s radio station and, in the shadow of the towers, a shrine to the fire god. From there you could look out across the teeming streets below to the sheen of light on the waters of Tokyo Bay. Perhaps the power of the god had some effect, because this cluster of wooden houses beneath the shrine had somehow escaped the worst of the wartime bombing.
Their house had a single big front room where they cooked, ate and, when Fergus was at home, sat together in the evenings on the comfortable old sofa in the corner, reading, chatting and listening to the wireless or to records on their second-hand wind-up gramophone. A sliding door opened into their little tatami-matted bedroom, and a steep wooden staircase led to an upper floor where Fergus had his den and wrote his pieces for the newspaper. This also housed their one great extravagance: the telephone that Fergus had decided to have installed so that he could avoid the wearisome trip into the Press Club to communicate with fellow journalists or Occupation Force officials. At the back of the house was a miniature square of walled garden, and a bathhouse with a wooden tub whose water was heated by a cantankerous charcoal stove. Now, every time she looked out into the garden, Elly imagined a small, dark-haired child playing there in the shadow of the bedding hung out to air in the sunshine.
She pushed her bowl aside and slipped the photo from the children’s home into her handbag. She needed to leave soon, but wanted to take advantage of Fergus’ absence to tidy the house a little before she set off to the hospital to see Mother.
Fergus’ study upstairs still had old wartime blackout curtains obscuring the paper-screened windows, and the room was half in darkness. Elly pulled the curtains open and looked despairingly at the mountains of books, papers and assorted other items strewn across the desk, shelves and floor. The desk she did not dare to touch, but she removed a vest, a pair of threadbare trousers, two shirts and five odd socks from the floor to put in the wash.
Her husband’s grey duffel coat had fallen off the back of his chair and was lying in a heap on the ground, and when Elly picked it up to hang it on a coat hook, a small book bound in thick purple rice paper fell out of its pocket. She opened it and skimmed through the pages, slightly surprised. It was a book of Chinese poetry, and Fergus, although he was passionate about Chinese history and politics, had never shown any great enthusiasm for poetry before. The pages of the book exuded a faint smell of lavender.
There was a sheet of paper, torn from a notebook by the look of things, stuck inside the front cover and inscribed with Fergus’ distinctive scrawl: Vida. Lotus Bookshop. 8 p.m. No date, just 8 p.m. A label was pasted in the back the book, decorated with a stylized water lily and bearing the words ‘Hasu Shobo — Lotus Bookshop, Old Books on Asia’ and an address in the Kanda bookshop district. On the title page of the volume there was a handwritten Chinese dedication in a flowing script that Elly couldn’t read, though she could pick out the characters for ‘eye’ and ‘heart’. The only signature was a large, flowing Roman letter ‘V’ at the bottom of the page.
Elly stood for a moment staring at the poetry book, and thinking back to the night when Fergus came home well after two in the morning. He had told her the previous day that he’d be doing another interview with Vida Vidanto, the Japanese poet, that evening, and when he stumbled into their bedroom, waking Elly by switching on the light, his eyes had been gleaming with excitement. He’d already published one article that featured Vida’s story alongside those of three other Japanese writers who had lived in China, but somehow he didn’t seem able to leave the subject alone.
‘I think I may be on to something big here,’ he kept saying as he lay beside Elly on their futon. She had smelled the sharp fumes of whisky on his breath even when she turned her head away from him. ‘This could be a big one, if I can just get to the bottom of it.’
He’d been getting more details from Vida about her time in China during the war, but when Elly asked him what he’d found out, he just shook his head and smiled his slightly crooked smile.
‘Later. Later. I need to get to the bottom of this first.’
He hadn’t explained what had kept him out half the night either, and Elly had made a conscious decision not to ask. And the following week again he had returned well after midnight with the same excited gleam in his eyes and the same half-smile on his face.
Now she closed the poetry book, carefully slipped it back into the duffel coat pocket and dropped the coat on the floor exactly where she had found it, before setting off to catch the tram to Tsukiji.
* * *
The day was warm, and the tram was crowded with people who seemed in a festive mood. There were women in flowered kimonos, and some in those summery dresses that were all the rage, the ones with the narrow waists and stiff flared petticoats under their skirts. Chil
dren perched on their parents’ knees, or clung tightly to their mothers’ hands as the tram rocked and rattled past the brightly decorated plate windows of the Mitsukoshi Department Store. The cheerful faces of her fellow passengers only deepened Elly’s obscure sense of unease.
Although she didn’t want to do this, she was thinking back to Ted Cornish’s Halloween party, and trying to remember exactly what had happened there. She had thought nothing of it at the time. Perhaps the sake she had drunk that day had made her perceptions blurry. But ever since Fergus’ most recent late-night meeting with Vida Vidanto (how did the woman get that ridiculous name?), fragmentary memories from the party had started to resurface in Elly’s mind.
Fergus and Ted Cornish had met before the war as students at Cambridge, where Fergus studied politics and economics, and Ted had spent a year on some kind of exchange fellowship, pursuing his fascination with Oriental languages. Now Ted was one of the Occupation’s bright young legal minds, and lived in the area of Tokyo that the Americans had renamed ‘Washington Heights’, in a building that looked as though it had been flown in straight from the suburbs of Kansas City. His house had a white-painted patio and a live-in couple who worked as his chauffeur and maid — a fact about which Ted, as a good New Deal Democrat, had the grace to be slightly embarrassed.
At Halloween, Ted liked to open his house to a random selection of homesick Americans and other expatriates. There would be hollowed-out pumpkins at the doorway, and tables laden with beer, wine and sake, cold cuts of turkey and plates of pumpkin pie within. Some of the younger, uninhibited guests would turn up sporting witches’ hats or cardboard devil masks. Elly had always thought of the American as a confirmed bachelor, and had been surprised, at last year’s Halloween party, to be introduced to Vida, who seemed to have taken charge both of the party and of Ted. They made an incongruous couple — the tall, slightly round-shouldered American in his corduroy slacks and cable-knit cardigan next to the Japanese poetess resplendent in shawls and earrings, interrupting each other as they spoke in animated Japanese about the peace clause in Japan’s new constitution. Elly had sat watching and nodding non-committally from time to time, trying to figure out the nature of the relationship between them.
THE LANTERN BOATS an utterly gripping and heart-breaking historical novel set in post-war Japan (Historical Fiction Standalones) Page 7