THE LANTERN BOATS an utterly gripping and heart-breaking historical novel set in post-war Japan (Historical Fiction Standalones)

by TESSA MORRIS-SUZUKI

  Elly waited until she and Fergus were safely on the tram heading back home before indulging in a little mimicry. ‘“And if it wouldn’t be too much of an imposition, Your Royal Highness, perhaps I could also polish your honourable shoes while I’m at it.” You’re a terrible man, don’t you know that, Fergus Ruskin! You with your butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth flattery.’

  ‘Well it worked, didn’t it,’ said Fergus defensively. ‘Look how he lapped it all up. You can bet we’re going to get a glowing letter of reference.’

  And Elly laughed, and gave his arm a squeeze of gratitude.

  CHAPTER 13

  Jun watched the taxi collect the Fox from her apartment building. He already knew where she was going: Goto had received information from on high that the Badger had been recalled to the United States and would be flying out from Haneda Airbase that day. Jun had been equipped with a vaguely military-looking khaki outfit — more appropriate than his student uniform for hanging around outside an air force base — and had been given extra money to pay for his taxi fare to Haneda, which was just as well, since the journey took longer and was more expensive than he had expected.

  The airbase turned out to be a long way from the city centre, surrounded by marshy stretches of partially reclaimed land where abandoned fishing boats and barges lay rotting in the mud. Jun got the taxi to wait for him some distance from the main gates of the base, and went the rest of the way on foot. A stiff breeze laden with smells of stagnant water was blowing in from Tokyo Bay, relieving the oppressive heat haze that hung over the landscape. A couple of birds of prey circled, mewing plaintively, over the road that ran along the base perimeter. When he approached the airfield entrance Jun could see that, as he had anticipated, the Fox’s taxi had stopped outside the metal gates, where the Badger was waiting for her. That was where she would say farewell to her American lover.

  The landscape was flat and open, and apart from the guards at the gate, there were few other people around. Jun could smell the fumes of aircraft fuel from the runway, and see a large aeroplane standing on the tarmac, its propellers already slowly rotating. From his distant vantage point, Jun watched the American put down the bags he had been carrying and place his arm around the Japanese poet’s shoulder. They stood there for a while, deep in conversation. The summer heat radiated up from the strip of white-paved road outside the airfield’s fence, making the two dark figures seem to quiver and ripple slightly in the shimmering air.

  Then the American bent down, took something out of one his bags — a largish rectangular box, it seemed to be — and placed it in the Fox’s arms. She cradled it for a moment before going back to her waiting taxi and placing the box on the rear seat. When she returned to the American, the two embraced, holding on to each other for what seemed to Jun like a very long time. He had thought that the Fox would wait to see her lover’s plane depart, but instead, when she separated herself from his embrace, she walked briskly over to the taxi and got into it, and the vehicle drove away down the road. As far as Jun could see, she didn’t even wave goodbye. The American picked up his bags and walked past the guard at the gate, who saluted him.

  Jun could have left then, but he lingered, staring through the wire-mesh fencing into the airfield. He had never seen aeroplanes as close as this before. In a day or two’s time, this great red-and-white-painted machine in front of him would be in America: the place he had seen in magazines and in the cinema where Goto had taken him to see Gun Crazy. Was America really the way it looked on the screen: all those fast cars and tall buildings and wild women in tight-fitting dresses? Jun thought that perhaps he might go there and find out someday.

  He would have liked to hang around until the plane took off, but it sat on the runway for a long time, the sound of its engine mingling with the sound of the wind and the cry of the birds overhead. Jun was conscious of his taxi, still waiting for him further down the road, so in the end he left without watching the American’s departure.

  * * *

  The next few days were uneventful. The Fox seemed to have taken to staying indoors, only venturing out after dark to collect some groceries from the nearest shop, which remained open late. Then she stopped going out altogether. Jun knew that she was still at home, because he could see the light come on in the window in the evening, but the front door of the apartment block stayed shut, except when the ratty-looking little man who used the offices on the second floor put in an occasional appearance. A couple of times the Fox had visitors. Once a woman — maybe the nurse from the Yamada Private Clinic, Jun thought — dropped by and stayed for about an hour, and the next day a delivery van came with a box of groceries.

  By the end of the second week after the Badger’s departure, Jun was beginning to grow worried. Now, even in the evenings, he could no longer see the bright light shining in the Fox’s front window. Instead, there seemed to be a faint glow of a lamp from some inner room of the apartment, but perhaps this was just a reflection from one of the outside street lamps. Could she have given him the slip?

  One day the Rabbit — Mrs Ruskin, as Jun now knew she was called — appeared at the door of the apartment block and rang the doorbell, but even then the Fox did not appear. The Rabbit hung around on the pavement outside for a few minutes, and approached the door of the café where Jun was sitting as though intending to come in, but then changed her mind. She returned to the front door of the apartment block, wrote a note on a piece of paper and dropped it through the letter box in the front door of the building. Then she walked away in the direction in which she had come.

  Jun’s daily reports to Goto grew briefer and briefer. The sergeant had been visibly excited by his report about the box that the Badger had given the Fox on his departure, and kept asking Jun about its size and shape. They had speculated together about its contents, Goto suggesting that it might contain some kind of communications equipment. But now Goto was beginning to look at Jun with suspicious, questioning eyes. ‘Nothing at all today? Are you sure?’ he kept asking. ‘She must have done something.’

  In the end, out of sheer boredom as much as fear of Goto’s scowls and mutterings, Jun began to use his imagination. He’d done this only once before — on the day when the Fox had given him the slip in Karuizawa. He had spent half the afternoon hunting for her in the streets of the little town, and then, being too embarrassed to admit his failure, invented a rather weak story about her meeting an elderly woman who might have been her aunt. Much to his surprise, Goto seemed to swallow that story, so now Jun felt emboldened to be more creative.

  On a hot, sultry day when the air was full of the clamour of cicadas, he imagined the Fox going out for a stroll in the early evening. She might head down the hill towards Ueno Park and wander along the path beside the lotus pond. Perhaps she would buy a dumpling from one of the stalls near the Benten Temple, and then sit on a bench to eat it. And maybe she would be joined there by a strange, foreign-looking man with a high collar, whom Jun had never seen before . . .

  Jun wrote all this down in his little green notebook, and liked the look of it. His imaginings were more interesting than reality. He no longer believed that he was being followed or watched, and when he reported his fantasy observations to Goto, the sergeant seemed pleased, and asked him searching questions about the appearance of the mysterious stranger.

  With a little practice, Jun found it surprisingly easy to invent stories about the Fox. He could feel his imagination being stimulated by the samurai adventures he had read in the past few months. He started to think of secret assignments between the Fox and the Rabbit. Goto had done some digging and produced a thin file of documents on the Ruskins, and Jun had quickly memorized its contents. Mrs Ruskin was half foreign, had been interned in Australia during the war and had a brother with dubious yakuza connections. Her husband was a journalist who wrote for a left-leaning British newspaper that had published some critical articles about US strategy in Korea. He was probably part of the espionage ring too. Jun had gathered, from
the chat around the table at the Zero Club, that journalists were often involved in spying.

  There were photos of both of the Ruskins in the file: the Rabbit staring solemnly straight at the camera, while Mr Ruskin looked as though he had been photographed at some kind of meeting or press conference — he was leaning across a desk with a smile on his face, and you could see other people in the background. His face was familiar: Jun felt fairly sure that this was the red-haired man whom he’d seen visit the Fox’s apartment one evening. What complicated lives these foreigners seemed to live!

  Jun found himself imagining a rendezvous between the Rabbit and the Fox next to the carp pond by the shrine on top of Atago-yama, where more documents would be handed over. He even went and sat by the pond again for a while, watching the mottled carp jostling each other under the surface of the water as they waited to be fed, and absorbing every detail of the scene, just so that he would be able to describe it in convincing detail if he was questioned by Goto.

  But when he returned to the Zero Club with pages of his notebook full of descriptions of this phantom encounter, he found Goto sitting at the table in the dining room, staring into space. As Jun entered the room, Goto glanced at him briefly but asked nothing about the day’s activities. Instead, he said briskly, ‘OK, Kamiya. Change of plan. No need to follow the Fox anymore. Mission cancelled. That task’s been taken over by someone else.’

  Jun was gripped by panic. Had Goto found out about his fictional reports? His mind scrabbled frantically for excuses, explanations. But no explosion of anger or sarcasm followed. The sergeant was looking pensive rather than angry.

  ‘Why?’ stammered Jun. ‘Have I done something wrong?’

  ‘No,’ responded Goto indifferently. ‘I think some other organisation’s taking this one on. Some friend of the colonel’s seems to have an interest in the woman. That’s the way things go here.’

  ‘So . . . who’s going to watch her now?’

  Goto grimaced as though he had bitten on a sour plum, and he stared at Jun coldly before replying, ‘I don’t know, and if I did, I sure as hell wouldn’t tell you. Just do what you’re told, remember. Cut the questions. You can go on following Mrs Ruskin, though. We still have an interest in her.’

  CHAPTER 14

  By late July, Ted Cornish’s request was starting to weigh on Elly’s conscience. She knew that she should go to see Vida, but felt uneasy about initiating the contact. What would she say when they met? ‘I’ve been asked to keep an eye on you’? ‘I’m suspicious about your relationship with my husband’? Could she pretend to have developed a sudden interest in learning Esperanto?

  Meanwhile, she’d had a telephone call from the hospital to say that Mother’s condition had worsened. Elly was desperately trying to make contact with her brother Ken, who — most annoyingly — had moved out of his rented rooms without bothering to get in touch with her or leave a forwarding address. She had to trail all the way over to Roppongi and wander around sleazy bars until she found a place called the Moulin Rouge, which Ken evidently frequented. She left a message with the bartender, asking him to pass it on to Ken when he next put in an appearance, but had no idea whether the message would ever reach her brother. She tried to make it to the hospital every day, but found it hard going. Mother was often asleep when she arrived, and even if she woke up, seemed too confused and weak to do much more than smile faintly and murmur a few words to Elly.

  In the end, it was the packet of photos that prompted Elly to act. Although Fergus had opened the envelope and taken a look at the photos, he made no comment about them, and left them lying on the table in their front room despite Elly’s repeated reminders that Vida wanted them back as soon as possible. Ten days after Ted’s departure for the States, the packet was still there, and when Elly pointed it out to Fergus, he surprised her by saying that he’d been having difficulty getting in touch with Vida lately. So Elly dug out the sheet of paper on which Ted had written Vida’s address, complete with a rough little sketch map showing the location of her apartment, and set off in the direction of Tokyo University to find her.

  It was easy enough to find the street — it ran straight along the side of the university campus in the direction of Ueno — and to identify the nondescript, brown-painted concrete building where Vida lived, which was opposite a post office and a shabby-looking café. The building, Elly thought, seemed an oddly impersonal home for someone with such a vivid personality. She remembered what Ted Cornish had said — that Vida knew many people, but had few real friends. Did she leave all her friends behind in China, Elly wondered, or is she an eternal outsider, one of those people who always likes to keep themselves to themselves?

  There were three doorbells next to the building’s front door — the bottom button unlabelled, the next reading Nomura Offices with no further explanation, and the top button marked with one of Vida’s artistic name-cards, this one looking slightly dog-eared. Elly pressed this bell and waited. There were no sounds from within, and she couldn’t tell whether the doorbell was working or not. She stepped back into the street and tried looking up at the windows of the building. Vida’s apartment was on the top floor, and had paper screens drawn across the windows. Elly could see no signs of life anywhere in the building.

  She wondered whether it was worth waiting. Vida might just be out on some minor errand and could come back at any moment. But the only obvious place to wait was a café across the road which, when she approached it, looked so unappealing that Elly was reluctant to go in. She could, of course, post the package of photographs through the letter box, but the building just had a single slot for letters in the front door, and she didn’t want the photos of wartime China to end up lying on the doormat where anyone might pick them up.

  After hanging around indecisively in the street for five minutes or so, Elly put the envelope back into her handbag, and instead jotted a short note to Vida on a page torn from the back of her pocket diary, suggesting a meeting sometime the next week. She added her address and telephone number, and slipped the note through the slot on the door.

  The following week, having still received no reply, she took a detour past Vida’s apartment building en route to an appointment with their lawyer to discuss the adoption. The place was as silent and unrevealing as ever, and she rang the doorbell only once before continuing on her way, feeling a sneaking sense of relief at having escaped some intense conversation with Vida about the state of global politics or the poet’s personal affairs, but also a sense of guilt at having failed to fulfil her promise to Ted.

  But at least, she thought, I tried.

  * * *

  ‘A little present for you, honeybun,’ said Fergus, when he arrived at the entrance to their lawyer’s office, red-faced and out of breath. He was waving a piece of paper in one hand and looking triumphant, and was, surprisingly, less than ten minutes late for their planned appointment with the lawyer, Mr Watanabe. ‘Honeybun’ was a private joke. Elly had bought Fergus the record of South Pacific for Christmas, and when they first listened to it, she had rolled her eyes and mimicked the saccharine gaiety of the Mary Martin song: ‘I’m hav-ing so much fun with Honey Bun’. So now she had become ‘honeybun’ as a tease whenever Fergus was feeling particularly pleased with himself. The paper in his hand was the long-awaited letter from Mr Ogiri, full of glowing reports on the Ruskins’ moral character and standing in the community, and offering unqualified support for their adoption plans.

  The lawyer’s office looked as though it had remained unchanged since the 1920s. Mr Watanabe sat behind a massive mahogany desk on which stood an ornate, old-fashioned brass telephone and a green mosquito coil, with a thin stream of pungent smoke spiralling upwards from its tip. There were stern photographs of the legal firm’s founders and a three-year-old calendar on the wall, and the scent of the mosquito coil mingled with an unmistakable odour of dust and crumbling paper.

  Mr Watanabe himself perfectly matched his setting. He was an elderly man with the long, thin
face and hollow cheeks of an undertaker, a bald pate surrounded by a few wisps of white hair, and half-moon glasses balanced on the end of his nose. But there was a shrewd gleam in his eyes. Elly’s friend at the university had assured her that Watanabe was one of the smartest men in the family law field.

  The lawyer perused Mr Ogiri’s letter of reference, nodding from time to time with satisfaction.

  ‘Excellent!’ he pronounced, when he got to the end. ‘This will be a great help.’

  He then produced another sheet of paper and started to run through the list of documents that they would need for the adoption process: birth certificates (a problem for Elly, though not for Fergus, who had been born in Glasgow), their marriage certificate, a letter from Fergus’ employers, and their passports. Elly’s hard-won British passport went everywhere with her. As the child of a foreign father, she had no right to a place in her mother’s Japanese family register, and it had taken complicated negotiations with the British Liaison Mission in Tokyo to get them to recognize her as a British subject. She sometimes worried what would happen when the Allied occupation was over, and she and Fergus became two aliens in her mother’s country (could she say ‘mother country’?), dependent on Fergus’ press credentials for the right to remain in Tokyo. But for now at least, her reassuringly solid British passport with its gold-embossed black cover seemed to provide some kind of security and protection.