Then Vida had slipped away to look after the other guests, and an older American had joined the conversation, which switched into English. Elly remembered the older man saying, dismissively, ‘All this fancy rhetoric about renouncing war — dangerous nonsense, in the current climate, if you ask me.’ And Ted had taken the pipe out of his mouth and jabbed the air with its stem, his face gradually going red as he embarked on an impassioned defence of the virtues of Japan’s ‘Peace Constitution’.
It had been evening already and dark outside when Elly had decided that it was time to leave the party, and had gone to look for Fergus. She wandered into the dining room, where a group of guests was sitting at one end of the table playing mah-jong, and then into the kitchen, where the diminutive maid was washing the dishes. It was then that she had looked through the kitchen window and glimpsed the sparks of two cigarettes on the patio outside. Fergus and Vida had been standing in one corner, their heads bent close towards each other. She could still remember the scene perfectly — the two figures silhouetted against the white patio wall, with lamplight casting their long shadows across the paving.
Elly’s only reaction at the time had been one of faint surprise. ‘Good heavens, what are you doing out here. You must be absolutely frozen!’ she remembered saying.
But now she kept wondering how long they had been out there together, and whether there was something that she should have seen, but had failed to notice.
* * *
Elly was so immersed in her own thoughts that she almost missed her stop, and had to elbow her way through the crowd and leap out just as the tram was about to start moving again. The road here ran past a mass of stalls and restaurants on the outer fringes of Tsukiji Market, and was seething with people. Elly’s senses were overpowered by the smells of brine and fish and rotting fruit and vegetables, and by the clatter of carts and barrels and the clamour of human voices. It was like some discordant choir: every stallholder trying to drown out competitors with more strident cries of praise for tasty scallops, top-quality lemons or succulent prawns. On a sudden impulse, Elly shouldered her way through the throng and bought a small bouquet of pink carnations to take to Mother.
The great white hospital on the river bank behind the market had been taken over by the American military. As she hurried past, Elly could see a one-legged soldier on crutches being helped into a jeep in the hospital forecourt: a sharp reminder of the invisible war raging across the waters in Korea. Her mother was in the barrack-like wooden annex in a backstreet beyond, to which the hospital’s civilian Japanese patients had been banished. Its corridors were crammed with rows of people waiting for treatment or to visit relatives. They were, as Elly had noticed before, oddly subdued. Their faces expressed resignation, and they spoke to one another, if at all, in hushed voices.
Elly took a deep breath as she walked towards her mother’s ward. She was afraid of this encounter and ashamed of her own cowardice. She hated watching her mother’s slow decline into feebleness, and hated her own inability to do anything about it. She couldn’t even find the right words to say. Mother was only fifty-three, for God’s sake, but her kidneys were rapidly failing, and it seemed there was nothing that could be done. They said it was probably the result of a tropical fever that she had picked up on the ship that had transported them from the Dutch East Indies to Australia. When Elly asked if there was any proper treatment or cure, the doctor just gave that little hissing intake of breath that signalled impending bad news, and talked vaguely about some new American machine that might be ready for use in another five years or so. He didn’t need to state the obvious: it would be much too late for Mother.
Mother’s room was at the far end of the corridor, and contained four beds pressed so close together that there was only just space for a small metal cabinet to fit into the gap between them. The woman in the bed next to Mother was ancient and demented, and moaned continuously, occasionally interspersing her groans with odd words like ‘Stop that!’ or ‘I want to go home’.
Mother was sitting up in bed, wearing the new polka-dot nightdress that Elly had brought on her last visit. Her face seemed to have grown duller and puffier since Elly last saw her, and she just stared blankly at the bunch of carnations, before murmuring, ‘Thank you, Eri-chan. Very pretty.’ Water from the flower stems dripped on to the bedding, and Elly realized that she should probably have bought a vase to put the flowers in. The best she could do was to lift the carnations gently out of her mother’s passive hands and prop them on top of the bedside cabinet, in the hope that one of the nurses would know what to do with them.
Her mother never complained. That was the most troubling thing. In Elly’s childhood, even in the internment camp in Australia, Mother had always been the strong one — the person who would stand for no nonsense. When angry, she had preferred to speak in Dutch because (as she once explained to Elly) its guttural tones were so much better than English or Japanese for expressing strong feelings. Godverdomme — God damn it! — was her favourite war cry, and Elly and her brother Ken would quietly mimic their mother’s brief outbursts of wrath behind her back, though they would never have dared do it to her face.
As a small child, Elly had adored and feared Mother. She could still remember the biting grip of her mother’s strong fingers on her arm, and the sting of the cane across her legs when she misbehaved, but also the glow of pride she had felt at her mother’s words of praise, because she knew that the words were true and came from the heart.
Now Mother spoke only in Japanese, and when Elly asked how she was feeling, she just smiled vaguely and murmured, ‘Oh, you don’t need to worry about me. The nurses are very good to me, you know.’
‘Did the doctor tell you any more about your treatment?’ asked Elly.
‘He says I’m doing fine. I think I’ll be going home quite soon.’
Does she really believe that? Elly wondered. She didn’t want to destroy her mother’s hopes, but couldn’t bear to go along with the deception.
The next question was the one her mother always asked, patiently and without a trace of resentment: ‘And how is Ken-kun? Have you seen him lately? I do hope he will come and visit me soon.’
Elly cringed every time she heard the question. She hadn’t seen her brother for months and had no idea what he was doing, though it almost certainly involved games of blackjack, lengthy drinking sessions in GI bars, and improbable schemes for making a fortune selling PX goods on the black market. Like father, like son.
To change the subject, she said, ‘Mother. I have something important I need to talk to you about. Fergus and I have decided that we’re going to adopt a child.’
The words came out in a rush, and she wasn’t sure what response she was expecting. Surprise? Delight? Disapproval? Instead, there was a long silence — so long that Elly almost wondered whether Mother had even heard her words.
The woman in the neighbouring bed had stopped moaning and was now muttering repetitively under her breath, ‘The bomb shelter. Where’s the bomb shelter?’
Elly extracted the photo from her handbag and placed it on the bedcovers. ‘Maya is her name. She’s the one in the middle at the back. The little girl with the wavy hair. See. She’s five years old. Sorry, it’s not a very good photo, but I wanted to give you an idea of what she looks like. She’s in a children’s home at the moment, but she needs a proper family of her own, a mother and father who can care for her.’
She didn’t mention the part about Maya’s father being an Indian soldier. One thing at a time, she thought.
Mother lifted the photograph and held it so close to her face that Elly wondered if her sight was failing.
At last she gave a long, slow sigh. ‘I would so much have loved to have a grandchild of my own,’ she whispered. But then she looked up at Elly with a faint smile. ‘She looks very sweet,’ she added.
Sweet, thought Elly. Not really the word I’d use. But she reached out and gently straightened her mother’s greying hair.
&nb
sp; ‘It may take a while yet. We’re just starting the adoption process. But I hope I’ll be able to bring Maya to visit you sometime quite soon. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
Her mother gave her another weak smile and nodded. ‘I’d like that very much,’ she repeated, as though she were an obedient child.
CHAPTER 6
Jun’s first task was to learn his way around the city. Every morning, after a quick breakfast of noodle soup at the Zero Club where he now lived, he received his instructions for the day from Goto or one of the other Japanese Americans:
‘Get a train to Tokyo Station, and remember the names of all the stops along the way. Count the number of exits from the station and find out where they are. Walk from the police box in front of the Imperial Palace to the Shirokiya Department Store and then to the Kabuki Theatre, and tell us exactly how long it took you. How many trams and policemen did you see on the way? What goods do they sell on the fourth floor of the department store?’
It was like a game, and Jun was surprised, at first, that they allowed him to play it on his own. But the weather was growing warm, he had a roof over his head to return to at night, and they had given him pocket-money in a battered wallet and a wristwatch with a broad leather strap. Why would he try to escape? And in any case, he felt almost certain that he was never really alone. Probably someone was following him all the time.
Maybe all the glass windows of the city were eyes, like the multiple shining eyes of the orb-weaver spider he had caught in Karafuto. Uncle Zima had lent him an old, half-broken magnifying glass so that he could see the spider’s row of beady black eyes, looking in all directions at once. The American colonel’s sticky web was stretched across the city, and wherever Jun went, invisible eyes would surely follow him. But then it occurred to him that he was part of that web. He, too, was now one of those shining eyes.
Meanwhile, he made the most of the exotic abundance of central Tokyo: the pearl necklaces and cut-crystal perfume bottles on the ground floor of the department store. How his sister Kiyo’s eyes would have widened if she could have seen those! In the basement below, which smelled of roasting coffee and pungent pickled radishes, there were food stalls where he could sample little slivers of grilled eel or red-bean jelly on toothpicks free of charge. On the train into and out of the city, he watched the softly dimpled limbs of the young women in their sleeveless frocks and silk stockings, and read the headlines on the other passengers’ newspapers. Executive’s Widow Slain by Robbers. Reds Attack Along Imjin River.
The colonel’s men might be observing his every move, but to the rest of the Tokyo population he seemed to be invisible — just another undernourished young man in a second-hand student uniform. There was a sense of unreality about it all, as though he were floating through a dream world in which he barely existed. He felt hazy and empty. His brain was a dry sponge that drank in the details of everything around him, and at the end of each day even Goto seemed surprised at how much he remembered.
Z Unit. That was the name of the organization to which Jun now belonged. He and some of the other Unit members had small, simply furnished single bedrooms in one wing of the Zero Club, a squat concrete building that stood in the corner of a weed-filled compound on the outskirts of the city, with nothing beyond but rice paddies and fields of onions. There were four others living there: Goto, Mishima, Nakano and a Japanese-speaking German called Kaspar. Apparently the place had once been a recreation centre for the employees of some big bank. Now the sign in English and Japanese outside the barbed-wire-topped sliding gates read Occupation Force Property. Entry by Unauthorized Personnel Strictly Prohibited.
Goto remained cold and unfriendly, but the other agents in the Zero Club treated Jun with a kind of tolerant indifference, seeming neither particularly surprised by, nor very interested in, the sudden appearance of the new recruit. Mishima and Nakano came and went at irregular hours, making trips to collect cargo from the Unit’s boats. From the fragments of conversation that he had overheard, Jun imagined these boats as being rather like the Tsushima-Maru — craft that slipped quietly in and out of hidden bays along the coasts of Japan, the Korean Peninsula, China and Russia.
The only other people in the Club were the Guests. Their rooms were in the opposite wing of the building, and had metal doors that were padlocked on the outside. Jun had yet to see any of the Guests in person, although occasionally he heard the clanging of doors and the echoing of voices as they arrived or departed very late at night. He understood, without being told, that their presence was not to be spoken about.
The American colonel who headed Z Unit was called Jack Canon and he came from Texas. He didn’t live in the Zero Club with his underlings. According to Goto, Colonel Canon had a fancy house somewhere near Yokohama, and his office was in the Western-style mansion where Jun had been taken on his arrival in Tokyo.
The others whispered about their commanding officer with edgy laughter and nervous admiration, exchanging tall stories about his unorthodox methods and extravagant moods. After a while, Jun began to see that Colonel Canon’s role in Japan was a bit like Colonel Brodsky’s in Karafuto: far-reaching but invisible. Z Unit didn’t appear in any official reports or organizational charts. When Jun tried asking Goto whether the colonel was army or intelligence, and whether he worked for GHQ or took his commands direct from America, the sergeant just laughed.
‘I think you’ll find that Colonel Canon doesn’t like to take commands from anywhere,’ he said.
The colonel may have been physically absent, but Jun could always feel his presence. And night after night, the mansion near Ueno Station reappeared in his dreams. He would be back in the pitch-black cellar, reaching out his arms to try to find the walls. But there were no walls, just stifling darkness that went on for ever and ever, and black water that grew deeper and deeper with every step he took, rising to cover his mouth and nose . . . He would awaken bathed in sweat and fighting for breath.
* * *
Once Jun knew his way around central Tokyo, he and Goto began to play another game. Goto, dressed in slacks and a golf shirt, would accompany him to the centre of town, and they’d choose a person for Jun to follow. Once, they trailed a hunchbacked old woman all the way across Hibiya Park, with Jun repeatedly having to bend down and retie his shoelaces in order to slow his pace to match the arthritic doddering of their target.
He learned what distance to keep — fifteen to twenty yards if possible, though less in crowded streets, so that he wouldn’t lose his mark, and further away in wide-open areas where his presence might become obvious. If the mark entered a building, the trick was to figure out where the entrances were. If there was only one way in, it was sometimes best to wait for your target to re-emerge into the street, but if there were several entrances and exits, you had to stay close behind and be alert to every movement. Goto insisted that Jun should take up smoking, because fumbling with packets of cigarettes and boxes of matches was the best excuse for halting or turning aside abruptly halfway down a street. Within a couple of weeks, Jun was getting through a pack of Lucky Strikes a day.
Throughout the training, Goto remained sour-tempered and sarcastic. ‘Moron! Useless idiot! Didn’t your commie puppetmasters in Karafuto teach you anything?’ he mocked, when Jun let a dark-suited businessman they were following slip into a crowded elevator and vanish into the upper floors of a big insurance building.
As they stood together on the train out of the city in the evenings, staring at the dusk that gathered over the huddled grey roofs of the suburbs, Jun noticed how his companion kept picking irritably at the skin around his thumbnails. Beside them, parents dandled infants on their knees and high-school girls giggled together over the pictures in their magazines, but Jun and Goto stood together separated by a wall of silence. Jun sometimes wondered what was going on in the sergeant’s close-cropped, round head.
It was not until he had finished more than a month of training that he was taken back to see Colonel Canon. Goto drove
him to the encounter in one of the Unit’s jeeps. When they set off from the Zero Club, Jun didn’t think that he was afraid. But once they passed Ueno Station and approached the narrow road that led to the gates of the mansion, his heart started to race, and he began to feel sick.
It was the first time he had seen the place in daylight, and Jun gazed at the gateway and dark evergreen trees on either side, trying to suppress his panic by absorbing every detail. The sign by the gate, he noticed, read Tokyo Anglican Theological College, and he briefly wondered whether this was some obscure joke, but a moment later the jeep had to swerve suddenly to avoid two elderly men in clerical dress, who were walking along the drive, one with his hands clasped behind his back, looking as though they were deep in thought or prayer.
By day the Western-style mansion didn’t seem quite as vast as it had by night, and Jun could see now that the shutters were broken in places and the paint was peeling from the windowsills. The stone lantern beneath the cedar tree stood crookedly on its base, and its surface was mottled with patches of dark green moss.
The afternoon was warm and sunlit, and two striped deckchairs had been set out on the lawn behind the main building. The colonel was lounging in one, with his feet on a canvas stool, while a middle-aged blonde woman sat next to him smoking through a silver cigarette holder. When Jun and Goto approached, the colonel shouted a greeting to Goto in English, and then, without getting up, stretched out his meaty hand for Jun to shake. Colonel Canon’s khaki shirt was open at the neck. Jun could see the hairs and beads of sweat on the colonel’s chest, the signet ring on his left hand, and the long-nosed black revolver lying in his lap.
THE LANTERN BOATS an utterly gripping and heart-breaking historical novel set in post-war Japan (Historical Fiction Standalones) Page 8