‘Hi, Kamiya-kun. Genki? You doing OK?’ asked the colonel in his throaty smoker’s voice, as though greeting an old friend. He removed his feet from the stool and gestured for Jun to sit down.
As soon as Jun was seated, the colonel lifted the pistol from his lap and, still reclining in his chair, raised it in line with his eye. He pointed the gun, not at Jun, but at a row of three whisky bottles that had been lined up on a fallen log on the far side of the lawn. The report of the gun as it fired was deafening, and Jun watched the flash of sunlight as one of the bottles shattered.
‘How’s that for a bullseye? Pretty neat, eh? Sugoi desho?’ laughed the colonel. ‘You wanna have a go? C’mon. Try it.’ He thrust the gun into Jun’s hands.
The pistol was surprisingly heavy, and the metal was warm. Jun had fired an ancient rifle on his hunting trips in the Karafuto forest, but had never handled a weapon like this before.
‘Hey. Don’t shoot me now!’ said the colonel, holding up his hands in mock terror. ‘Over that way. More to the right.’
The kick of the pistol when Jun fired seemed to run right up the bones of his arms. His shot veered wildly off to the right and the bullet slammed into an upper branch of one of the trees.
‘Nice try, buddy!’ The colonel leaned forward in his seat to pat Jun on the arm, while the woman burst into peals of laughter. Jun hoped that they couldn’t see how much his hands were shaking as he gave the gun back to the colonel.
After that, he sat stiffly on the stool while the colonel and Goto spoke in English. Jun could tell that they were talking about him because of the way that they looked at him now and again, sometimes nodding or laughing. At one point, Goto said something that the colonel found so funny that he slapped his knees in amusement, and the blonde woman wiped her eyes with a white cotton handkerchief.
At last, the colonel reached under his deckchair and pulled out a rather battered Manila folder.
‘There you go, kiddo,’ he said. ‘Shukudai. Your homework.’
He opened the folder and showed Jun the photo pinned inside. It was a shot of the profile of a woman who might have been almost forty, but was still smooth-skinned and clear-eyed, with a long oval face and hair tied in a bun at her neck.
‘Beauty, ain’t she?’ The colonel nudged Jun’s knee. ‘Suspected communist spy. You are one hell of a lucky boy. Your job is to find out everything about her.’
‘Everything,’ repeated Goto, translating the colonel’s words. ‘What time she gets up in the morning, what she eats, where she goes shopping and what she buys, how much money she has, which bank she uses, what she reads, who she spends time with. Particularly her American lover. We want to know everything about the pair of them. What do they do together? What do they talk about? Does he ever give her anything — stuff that looks like documents?’
The colonel added something with a chuckle, and when Jun looked questioningly at Goto, the sergeant frowned with annoyance and said, ‘The colonel says you also need to find out what side of the bed she likes to sleep on — but don’t even think about taking that literally. You are never to speak to her, understand? Just watch and listen to everything. Her real name is Toko Kasumi, but she uses an alias. You’ll find all the details in the file. You will always refer to her by the code name: Fox.’
Goto fished his notebook and pencil out of his pocket and scrawled the word in large letters on a blank page. F O X.
‘About time you learned some English,’ he said. ‘Fox. That’s the English for kitsune.’
Jun repeated the word, and the woman in the deckchair mimicked his pronunciation with another little yelp of laughter.
* * *
As they drove back in the usual silence, Jun felt light-headed with relief. He was alive. He had been accepted. He was part of the Unit. His nerves were tingling with excitement at the prospect of having a mission of his own.
It was starting to grow dark, and lights were appearing in the windows of the suburban houses that lined the narrow roads leading to the Zero Club. When they stopped at an intersection to let a couple of gravel trucks pass, Jun found himself staring through a window into the warmly lit front room of a house where a family was seated on cushions around a low dining table. Two little boys of about ten or so, twins maybe, were sharing some joke as their mother ladled soup into their bowls. One child had his bare arm resting gently around the other’s shoulders. The mother had shoulder-length straight hair that fell across her eyes when she bent forward over the table.
Other people’s lives, thought Jun. How seductive they were. He imagined looking through a window and watching the woman in the photo — the woman they called the Fox — untying her bun and letting her hair spread across her shoulders.
But as soon as they got out of the jeep in the Zero Club compound, Goto turned on Jun. ‘You can wipe that stupid smile off your face right now,’ he snapped. ‘I don’t know why the hell the colonel’s given you this job, but I guess it’s to find out just how quickly you screw up. I told him about what happened in the insurance office. He thought it was hilarious. I think it’s pathetic. For all I know, you really are a commie agent, screwing up on purpose because you want to sabotage our work. We should have dealt with you on the day you got to Tokyo.’
‘Dealt with’. They used that expression quite often in the Unit — ‘That guy’ll have to be dealt with . . .’
It was, perhaps, the dizziness of shifting emotions and the vibration of his nerves that made Jun respond as he did. Suddenly, he could no longer bear the sergeant’s endless bitterness and hostility. He rounded on Goto, his whole body shaking, and the words burst out of his mouth before he knew what he was saying. ‘So you think you’re so clever, do you, Goto? You miserable, arrogant bastard. Calling me useless and a traitor. Calling me a Red. I’m sick of it. I’ve had it with your insults. I’ve just been trying to survive. But what about you, then? Selling your soul to the Americans. Weren’t they Japan’s enemy just a few years ago? You’re Japanese, aren’t you, and here you are working for them! You even speak Japanese like an American. You’re more of a traitor than I am.’
Goto’s grabbed Jun by the collar of his jacket, and pushed him hard against the fence, his forearm pressing against Jun’s windpipe. Pinned against the sharp angled bars of railings, Jun struggled helplessly, surprised by Goto’s strength. For a space of time that seemed unending, the sergeant glared into his eyes in silence, his face contorted with fury. His stillness was far more menacing than any words.
Then suddenly the words poured out. ‘You think I love America?’ snarled Goto. ‘You think I love the colonel? That what you think? You don’t know shit. Wanna know what America did to my family? America took our farm. It took our house. It stuck us in a hellhole in the middle of the desert. My pop died there.’
‘I’m sorry,’ whispered Jun, but Goto wasn’t listening.
‘He was born in California, my pop, and so were all his kids, me included. He loved that place, thought he was a proud American, and then the war comes along and suddenly they decide that we’re nothing but sneaky Japs and have to be locked up like dangerous animals in a cage. My pop couldn’t bear it. I don’t even want to talk about how he died. I didn’t join the military because I love America. I joined to survive, and because I hate the Soviets even more. The Americans — they just take your land and your property. The Reds — if they hate you they kill you too, and all your family. So don’t you ever give me that crap about being a traitor again, because if you do I’ll throttle you with my bare hands. Understood?’
In the dim evening light, Jun could see a gleam in Goto’s eyes that might almost have been tears.
‘And if you ever repeat what I’ve just told you, I’ll throttle you for that too,’ added the sergeant more softly.
Then Goto abruptly let go of Jun’s jacket, turned and started walking towards the front door of the Zero Club. He’d only gone a few yards when he looked back. Jun flinched, expecting another tirade, but instead the sergeant caught
him off guard again. ‘Hey Kamiya,’ he said, quite calmly, ‘You know how to play stud poker?’
‘No,’ said Jun.
‘C’mon. I’ll show you,’ said Goto.
And they walked together across the wasteland towards the pool of arc lighting that illuminated the front door of the Zero Club.
* * *
It only took Jun a couple of days to memorize the contents of the Manila folder. He learned the Fox’s place and date of birth, the schools she had attended and the name of the poetry circle in Karuizawa that she had belonged to before she went off to live in Manchuria before the war. He read police surveillance reports about her life in the city of Harbin, where she had belonged to a left-wing literary group whose members (to judge by the names) were a multinational bunch of Chinese, Russians and Jews. The names meant nothing to him, but he wondered whether these were famous people that he should have heard of.
There was a document compiled by the Japanese military police in Harbin, describing how the Fox had been on their list for arrest but had escaped and fled south, all the way to Canton. There, according to the report, she had become the mistress of some Chinese communist who was engaged in underground activities in the mountains of Hainan Island. Jun had no idea where this was until he located it on a decorative map of Asia on the wall of the Shirokiya Book Department. It was right off the very south of China, and was ornamented on the map with an image of a palm tree, which he found surprising. He’d always thought of China as being a cold place. The Fox had joined her Chinese lover in Hainan, and seemed to have stayed there until the after the end of the war, when she returned to Japan. The report didn’t say what happened to the lover — Jun presumed that he must have died.
There also was a report on the woman’s current lover, an American who was given the code name ‘Badger’. It seemed that he had associated with known communists when he’d spent a year studying in Cambridge before the war.
Then Jun set out to find his target, feeling the same sense of excitement that he had known as a child, as he followed the delicate imprints of the feet of Arctic hares through the snows of Karafuto. The Fox. The name delighted him. It reminded him of the legends his mother had told when they sat in front of the stove on dark evenings — about beautiful women who were possessed by foxes: the fox spirits would creep under their fingernails and into their bodies, and fill them with supernatural powers. The only sign of the transformation was the long, furry tail that became visible when the fox woman opened her kimono. Fox women lured foolish men into marriage, and the gruesome endings to the stories only made them all the more enchanting to Jun and Kiyo, as they sat listening to them in the flickering light cast by the flames of the stove.
And when at last he found her, Jun’s first thought was that she perfectly matched the image that he had formed of the fox women in his mother’s stories. As he had hoped, her hair was not fastened up in a bun, but flowed down her back, and was tied with a black velvet ribbon. She wore loose dresses that reached almost to her ankles and seemed to float around her as she walked in her relaxed and carefree manner, taking larger strides than most Japanese women did, as though she were at ease with her own body and the world around her.
The place where the Fox lived was a little disappointing, though: a third-floor apartment in a brown-painted concrete building on a dull street not far from Tokyo University, opposite a little local post office that looked as though it dated back to the Meiji era. But, as Jun quickly realized, the post office was an unexpected piece of good fortune. There was a wooden notice board on its outside wall adorned with a mass of advertisements and message cards — everything from appeals for the return of lost cats to unspecified ‘personal services’ from young women and warnings of Armageddon from the latest new religion. Jun found that he could browse these at leisure as he waited for the Fox to appear from her building. There was also a grimy little café next to the post office, where he could sit on a high wooden stool by the window observing the life of the street outside through smoke-darkened windows. He spent most evenings in the café, eating its greasy plates of curry rice, watching the lighted square of the window in the apartment across the road and, from time to time, observing the tall Western figure who would arrive at the front door of the apartment block around eight or nine o’clock.
The Badger was a lanky, pipe-smoking American with colourless hair that flopped over his forehead, and Jun soon learned to recognize his distinctive form in its long beige mackintosh when he appeared at the door of the apartment block after dark. When the Badger pressed the bell, the Fox would swiftly open the door to him and he would disappear inside. He was the most regular visitor, though Jun suspected that the Fox might have several foreign lovers, for one evening another man, who was shorter and stockier than the Badger and had bright-red hair, was also admitted to her apartment and stayed there for hours. The complexity of the Fox’s life intrigued him.
Sometimes, as Jun watched from his seat at the café window, he could see shadows in the room on the other side of the road — a raised arm or the profile of a face. There were paper screens drawn across the windows, but the enlarged shadows that were cast on the screens by the lamplight made it possible to observe fleeting moments in the lives of the people in the apartment with surprisingly clarity. At times the figures seemed to merge together, entwining with one another. But the shadows would always disappear again as they moved through the room, never giving Jun enough time to see exactly what they were doing. And the café owner always kicked him out at half past nine.
On other days, Jun tailed the Fox to a restaurant on the top floor of the Shirokiya Department Store, where she often met the Badger for lunch. So far, he hadn’t seen her visit the American’s house. The restaurant was convenient for Jun because it was large and always full of people, and the food was reasonably cheap. He could afford to sit at a table, lingering over a pot of Western-style tea and watching the couple from a distance without attracting attention. He saw them laugh over inaudible jokes and sometimes lean towards each other across the table, their hands touching. Occasionally he could catch fragments of their conversation — they always spoke in Japanese — but it never made much sense to him. He heard them talking about people called Joe McCarthy and Ezra Pound, but when Jun reported this to Goto, the sergeant just shrugged and said they weren’t important. The Fox and her American lover behaved, Jun thought, precisely the way people in foreign movies behave when they are supposed to be in love. But he never saw the American hand over any documents — only, at one meeting, a single long-stemmed red rose.
Having a surveillance mission sounded exciting, but most of the time, as Jun was discovering, it was just a matter of sitting still and waiting for something to happen, the way the golden spiders on Karafuto used to sit at the centre of their webs, waiting for hours for the faintest tremor of silken threads. And even then, the tremors often turned out just to be the wind or the fall of leaves.
Goto had provided Jun with a supply of green notebooks for recording his observations, and he dutifully used these to note down the Fox’s purchases of soy sauce and matches and spring onions from the local grocery shop, and her visit to a fortune teller who kept a little stall outside a nearby Shinto shrine. Jun was unable to get close enough to hear what the fortune teller said, but he did notice that the Fox seemed to be smiling faintly when she left the shrine.
On days when he arrived outside the Fox’s building early enough in the morning, he spotted the postman, who occasionally posted letters through the slot in the front door, and two newspaper delivery boys, who would come running down the street with bags slung over their shoulders. As far as Jun could tell, the Fox was the only person who actually lived in the gloomy brown building. The floor beneath hers was occupied by something called ‘Nomura Offices’, and the ground floor seemed to be vacant, so he assumed that the newspapers that arrived at the building every day were for her. From the trademarks on the delivery boys’ sacks, he deduced that she read the A
sahi and Mainichi newspapers, but not, apparently, the communist daily, Akahata. He also carefully recorded the fact that the Badger had been carrying a six-week-old copy of Life magazine under his arm the last time the couple met for lunch. Somehow, though, he doubted that this was really the sort of information that Colonel Canon was looking for.
Things didn’t really begin to get interesting until the fourth week of Jun’s surveillance mission — the day he first saw the Rabbit; the day of his first encounter with the Zero Club’s invisible Guests.
CHAPTER 7
The old shop stood on a street corner near Kanda Station, and its window seemed to Elly like a work of art. To one side lay a single gold-embossed box, just opened a fraction to allow shoppers to see the fan of rice crackers inside, and to the other stood a display of two perfect iris flowers surrounded by little folded rice-and-sweet-bean cakes, their outer surfaces delicately coloured to match the hues of the leaves and flowers.
Elly had been racking her brains to think of a suitable gift to bring to the impending meeting with the businessman Ogiri Joji at the Imperial Hotel when she remembered this place. She had passed it and admired its displays before, but had never ventured inside. It looked alarmingly expensive. But the fate of Maya might hang on the success of their encounter with Mr Ogiri. They needed just the right present to smooth the sensitive discussions about their adoption case.
‘Gomen kudasai,’ she called out in greeting as she slid open the shop door. Once inside, she found herself hovering between a multitude of choices, unable to make up her mind. The shopkeeper, an elderly man with a fine-boned, intellectual face, took one look at Elly’s slightly exotic appearance and insisted on speaking to her in fractured English, oblivious to all her efforts to shift the conversation back to Japanese.
‘Very best quality. Foreign ladies like it very much,’ he kept saying, as Elly inspected each boxed selection of cakes or crackers, and hesitantly asked about prices.
THE LANTERN BOATS an utterly gripping and heart-breaking historical novel set in post-war Japan (Historical Fiction Standalones) Page 9