‘From Korea. They brought me in the boat. They’re going to kill me. I’m . . .’ Jun was unable to catch the last word.
‘What’s he saying?’ interrupted Kaspar.
‘He’s just raving,’ said Jun, thinking quickly. ‘He’s talking about his grandmother in Korea.’
‘What’s your name?’ Jun asked the man. But the bloodshot eyes were rolling again, and the body writhing, and the only reply was a torrent of words broken by frantic gasps for air: ‘They’ve broken the window . . . the window in the factory . . . You’ve got to get them out . . . Get the horses. They’re burning . . . The horses are burning . . .’
By now, Goto and Mishima were back, Goto carrying a leather bag in one hand. He pushed Jun roughly away from the bed. ‘You can get out now, Kamiya. Go back to your own room.’
Jun retreated as far as the doorway but paused there, unable to take his eyes off the man on the bed. He could still feel the pain in his hand where the man had gripped it. He watched Kaspar take something out of the leather bag. The German cursed as he fiddled with the object in his hands, trying to screw two pieces together.
‘Get out!’ yelled Goto, and Jun stepped back into the corridor, but not before he had glimpsed Kaspar swiftly plunging a syringe into the man’s arm. The left arm. The one handcuffed to the bedstead.
Back in his own bedroom, Jun sat on his bed, listening for noises. He heard the banging of doors and the sound of rapid footsteps. Then a silence, and, much later, as he was starting to drift off to sleep, a burst of loud voices and someone — Kaspar, probably — ordering the speakers to be quiet. Then there was a kind of soft noise — thump, thump, thump — like a heavy bag being dragged down steps, the sound of a motor starting up outside his window, and of a vehicle being slowly driven away into the dark.
CHAPTER 11
Vida Vidanto stared out of the grimy train window, watching for the peaks of the mountains to appear on the far horizon. This was how it had been in her childhood — in another age and another world. She and her little sister Fumiko had always performed this ritual together, competing to be the first to glimpse the mountain peaks rising through the clouds. Their older brother Hajime had joined the competition too in the early years, before he went off to cadet school and then to the army. Vida could still remember the sense of excitement that accompanied that game, as they escaped the sweaty heat and boredom of Tokyo for summer in Karuizawa.
As soon as the mountains came into view, their nursemaid used to bring out the picnic basket and hand out rice dumplings, cups of cold wheat tea and a shining red apple each for them to eat. And for that one moment there would be a sense of total freedom, in which they could forget the fact that once they arrived at their summer house and Father joined them, they would be back in the prison of a strictly timed regime. Every moment of the day planned out. No wasted moments. No idling or daydreaming. Calligraphy classes; flower arranging; tennis lessons; archery classes; family walks where the children trailed silently behind Father, who would march ahead with the zeal of a sergeant major, taking exactly the same monotonous track through the forest every day. They were required to keep a journal, full of expressions of enthusiasm and lists of sporting achievements, which Father read aloud to the assembled household at the end of the summer.
That, Vida sometimes thought, must have been where I first learned duplicity.
Today, Vida had bought a packed lunch at Tokyo Station, but she had no appetite, and found that she could only manage a few mouthfuls of rice. Her little shadow, as she liked to call him, was sitting at the far end of the carriage, and she wondered what he was having for his lunch. She had first noticed the young man’s presence about a week ago, hanging around outside her apartment building, and then again, soon after, she had spotted him inexpertly ducking into a doorway to avoid her as she came out of the local grocery with her purchases. He was skinny, and always seemed to wear that same shabby black student uniform, and although she was puzzled by his presence, Vida felt more amused than afraid. Who, she wondered, found her life interesting enough to observe in such detail? She was almost tempted to catch the young man unawares and try talking to him, but something told her that this might be unwise. Safer to let whoever it was go on watching her, thinking that they were doing it unobserved.
At Karuizawa Station, her shadow had no chance. Although this mountain retreat had changed and grown in the past twenty years, she still knew the place like the back of her hand. A bus to the Mampei Hotel was waiting in the station forecourt, and she climbed in and took a seat at the very front, waiting patiently until her shadow, his face half concealed by a newspaper, followed her on the bus and found his way to the back. At the precise moment when the bus driver started the engine, but before the doors were closed, Vida darted out of the vehicle and through a crowd of schoolchildren milling around in front of the station entrance, feeling almost like a child herself, playing hide-and-seek. She hurried across the footbridge to the far side of the station and wandered more slowly along the little path that ran beside the smooth green fairways of the golf course, stopping a couple of times to check that she had escaped her pursuer, before taking the narrow road that crossed back again to the other side of the railway.
In Karuizawa town she wove through the familiar backstreets, looking out for landmarks. St Paul’s Church, with its sharply pointed roof and fanciful bobbled spire, was still there, but the building that had housed their favourite sweet store was now an expensive antique shop. In her childhood, the little town had always intrigued and excited her. Watching the foreigners who congregated here to escape the summer heat of Tokyo — the women in their fancy hats, the men in their tailored hiking outfits — she had imagined that she was in some distant country — Switzerland, maybe, or Bohemia. Now most of the foreigners seemed to be Americans, many of them in military uniforms. The buildings were smaller than she remembered, and their layout seemed to have shifted in some indefinable but disconcerting way. But of course, what had really changed was not the town but herself. The child and the young woman that she had been then were more alien to her than any of the blonde-haired women in the Western-style tea shops, or the young soldiers in fatigues who strolled down the middle of the roads as though they owned them.
It was a long walk to her rendezvous, but Vida had never been afraid of walking. Even now, when she became tired and breathless more easily, she enjoyed the chance to take the narrow path that led past the little Protestant chapel and out into the forest. The trees soared on either side, almost blocking out the light. She loved these forests. Perhaps this was what people who believed in God felt when they stood in one of the great cathedrals of Europe: the silence, the ancientness, the shafts of light from above, transforming the mundane — a patch of pine needles, a cluster of small mushrooms — into the sublime. She could hear the birds in the high branches. She had been away from this place for too long.
In China, and particularly when she was on Hainan Island, she had learned to walk for days, to the point of total exhaustion, enduring the leeches and the soaking tropical downpours, crossing rivers on narrow, rotting logs, sleeping curled on the floor in a corner of a makeshift palm-thatched hut, wakened again and again by the wailing of the women outside as they mourned their dead husbands. Ted and the journalist Fergus, to whom she had only told a fraction of the story, kept showering her with inappropriate compliments and telling her that she was heroic, but on Hainan she had learned her own limits. If she had known what she was going to find there, she would never have set off to play revolutionary games in the belief that she could change the world.
The path through the Karuizawa forests ran alongside a little rivulet for a while, and then joined a small country road which led to the Usui Inn, the place chosen for this meeting. Vida almost missed the entrance to the inn, marked only by a bramble-covered wooden sign at the entrance to an overgrown driveway. She wondered how many visitors came this way. The drive seemed too narrow for a car, and its surface was thickly
carpeted with dry pine needles that muffled her footsteps. As she walked towards the inn, still invisible among the trees, Vida realized that that she had already made up her mind what she was going to say at the meeting. Those memories of Hainan had helped to make everything clear.
* * *
The door of the inn was open, but the matted corridor inside was deserted. The windows were shuttered, and the interior of the building unlit.
‘Hello,’ Vida called. ‘Anyone here?’
There was no answer, though she thought that she could hear the sound of voices from a room at the far end of the corridor. The owner of the inn, she’d been told, was a sympathizer. Presumably he had let them have free run of the place. Walking down the dark corridor, her fingers trailing against the wooden wall, she considered just turning around and going away without facing them. She could disappear: move somewhere completely new where they couldn’t find her, and never have to face them again. But she knew in her heart that what she was really afraid of facing was her broken dreams, and those would always follow her, wherever she ran to.
‘Comrade Vida! At last!’ said the man with the long beard and horn-rimmed glasses, appearing from a doorway. ‘We’ve been waiting for you.’
‘I’m sorry to have kept you, Comrade Hasuda,’ she replied.
She was never quite sure whether or not there was a touch of self-mocking irony in the bookseller’s use of the word ‘Comrade’. He looked at her suspiciously when she used the same term in reply, perhaps suspecting sarcasm, or perhaps feeling that she was taking egalitarianism too far.
There were two others with him in the room: a stocky young man wearing glasses as thick as pebbles, and a middle-aged man with the lined and leathery face of a farmer.
‘Comrade Dan. Comrade Ota,’ said Hasuda. Not their real names, thought Vida. But then again, they could say the same about me.
There were beer bottles on the low table in the middle of the room, and she would have loved to drink a glass, but resisted the temptation, and instead went in search of a tap, which yielded a slightly brownish trickle of iron-flavoured water.
‘You’ll know what we’re here for,’ said Hasuda, when she had taken her seat on a cushion at the table. ‘It’s been coming for some time now. The purges of comrades from schools and universities and the professions; the undercover surveillance; the arrests on trumped-up charges. The Americans are well and truly showing their imperialist colours. The time for strategic cooperation, or whatever it was called, is over now.’
He sounded, Vida thought, as though he was addressing a public meeting. She seemed to be expected to say something, but she kept quiet.
‘We need you to join us, Comrade Vida. We’ll be creating a base not far from here, in the mountains. You know this area well, I believe?’
‘Yes,’ said Vida with a smile. ‘My parents had a summer house here, or perhaps,’ with a little glance at the weather-beaten face of Comrade Ota, ‘you might call it a summer palace. We used to spend our holidays here when I was a child, and I came back here for a while after I graduated from college. I used to know the area pretty well, though this is the first time I’ve been here for years.’
‘Perfect. We’ve all heard about the extraordinary things you achieved in China. You’re one of the few among us who really knows what life is like on the frontline of the revolution — an immensely valuable experience. And we urgently need someone to lead our work with farm women — persuade them that the revolution means liberation from patriarchy as much as it means liberation from the landlords and from capitalist oppression.’
Neither Dan nor Ota had spoken yet, and Vida wondered what their part in all of this was. Ota held a beer bottle between his gnarled hands, and occasionally took a swig from it as he listened.
‘Comrade Hasuda,’ said Vida, finding that her heart was starting to beat a little faster as she spoke, ‘I’m flattered by your confidence in my abilities, but I’m afraid it’s mistaken. Look at me. I have never done a day’s work in a field. It’s true I experienced some tough living conditions in Hainan, but that’s a very different proposition from being able to understand the lives of farm women and speak to them in terms that that they can relate to.’
‘Oh, spare us. We just haven’t got time for that sort of self-doubt and introspection,’ said Hasuda. His voice rose a tone as his agitation increased. ‘This is a crisis. Look at what’s happening to our country. Half the war criminals are out of the gaols, and in another year they’ll be back on the government front benches. Is that what you want to see? Do you want to see Japan drawn into the next world war on the side of the Americans? That’s what’ll happen if we don’t fight now. We need you to be part of this, Comrade Vida.’
Vida hesitated for a moment, and sighed. ‘Comrades,’ she said, addressing all of them, ‘I wish I could. I truly wish I could. I understand your anger and your passion. I’ll never betray your confidence. But I just can’t join you. I haven’t got the skills for it. Most importantly, I haven’t got the faith. Not anymore. I wish I could believe that the Japanese peasants were about to rise up like their Chinese brothers and sisters and throw off the imperialist yoke, but however hard I try, I can’t make myself believe it. When I look around, what I see is people making more money than they’ve ever had in their lives from the Korean War, and farmers who are better off than they’ve ever been. I’m not saying they aren’t oppressed and exploited. Of course they are. But I don’t think they are about to rise up and join the revolution. Please,’ she lifted her hand as Hasuda tried to interrupt her, ‘please hear me out. I’m not trying to dissuade you from doing what you think is right. I’m only saying that I haven’t got the necessary conviction to join you. If I tried, I’d just let you down. I’ve learned my own limitations. I have a task that I need to do. Two tasks, actually. Small tasks, and you probably wouldn’t approve of either of them, but to me, they’re the only ways that I can serve the cause. I have to do this my own way.’
They tried to persuade her, of course. They talked for another hour, Hasuda growing more circuitous and verbose the longer he talked. Comrade Dan chimed in at one point with some comments about the impending collapse of capitalism. A recent university graduate, thought Vida. She kept expecting Hasuda to bring up her relationship with Ted Cornish. She had done nothing to keep it secret, and felt sure that the bookseller knew about it. She expected a tirade on the corrupting influence of emotional entanglements with the imperialists, but it never came, and she was grateful to Hasuda for that, at least. In the end, the meeting concluded like T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ — not with a bang but a whimper. Comrade Hasuda shrugged his shoulders in apparent resignation.
‘It’s your choice, of course, Vida.’ She was, apparently, no longer Comrade. ‘I would never want to force anyone into this, and I’ll always respect what you’ve done for the cause. I just hope you don’t regret your decision later. It’s not too late to change it.’
‘You’ll be the first to know if I do, Comrade Hasuda,’ she said with a smile.
* * *
A soft breeze was blowing by the time Vida left the inn. She could hear the hiss of the wind in the canopy of the trees. A sudden snapping of branches startled her, and she turned just in time to see a dappled deer leap across the pathway and vanish into the undergrowth.
She wondered why they’d found it necessary to bring her all the way here, into the depths of the forest, for a conversation that they could just as well have had over a cup of tea in the back room of the Lotus Bookshop. Was it simply Comrade Hasuda’s love of cloak-and-dagger theatrics? Or perhaps, if she had agreed to join them, they would instantly have whisked her off to the nearby mountain eyrie from which they planned to launch their revolution. She couldn’t help laughing inwardly at the fact that none of them seemed to have guessed the nature of the most pressing of the tasks keeping her from joining their guerrilla band. These high-minded men, she thought. Their minds are sometimes so high that they can’t see the realitie
s in front of their noses.
As it was, she would still be in time to catch the four fifteen train to Tokyo if she headed back to the station now. But instead, she turned the other way, following the road as it curved into a stretch of forest where stone gateways and wrought-iron fences marked the entrance to large private estates, their houses mostly invisible from the road. She had never been along this road before, but she knew the address by heart. The house she was looking for was not locked away behind walls or railings, but had a relatively modest, open entrance that belied the splendour beyond. The driveway led through a patch of forest to a lawn and a paved courtyard in front of a large house built of white stucco criss-crossed by dark wooden beams. A fountain was playing in the centre of the courtyard, and an expensive-looking car was parked to one side.
Fumiko had been a small, shy, affectionate fifteen-year-old when Vida left for China, and in the first letters that Vida received, her little sister had shared her schoolgirl crush on a classmate’s older brother and her heartbreak at the death of her beloved macaw Chico. Over the years, though, and particularly since her marriage to Kawano Akio, an up-and-coming young executive in their father’s bank, Fumiko’s infrequent letters had grown increasingly distant and formal. The most recent ones were a repetitive litany of comments about the weather, family gossip and descriptions of dinner parties and tennis matches with people Vida had never heard of. But Fumiko had, at least, continued to write. Vida had written just once from China to her brother, and twice to her mother. Neither of them had replied, and her father had been a lost cause from the start. Vida hadn’t been prepared to waste the cost of a postage stamp on him.
She walked slowly to the front door of the big house and rang the doorbell, hearing it chiming somewhere deep within. After a rather long wait, the door was opened by a uniformed maid.
‘Yes?’ said the maid, looking warily at Vida’s rather travel-worn dress and shawl and her sandalled feet.
THE LANTERN BOATS an utterly gripping and heart-breaking historical novel set in post-war Japan (Historical Fiction Standalones) Page 13