When the Rabbit burst out of the apartment building and ran towards the main road, Jun almost called out to her, pleaded with her for help. But she barely glanced his way, and was gone before he could gather the courage. So instead, he started walking with no direction in mind, except the certainty that he was not going back to the Zero Club. The other Unit members would soon notice that he was missing and start looking for him, but he no longer cared about that. He was never going back.
If he had faced the facts, he could have foreseen it all, all apart from one thing . . . The thing she had managed to conceal from her killers, tucked away behind the loose piece of panelling in the wall. Jun had always imagined that the Fox might have hiding places in her apartment for the secrets in her life. But he had never guessed what he would find hidden there. In all those countless hours spent watching her, he had never spotted the one secret that really mattered. How, he thought, could I have been so stupid?
He remembered, then, old Uncle Zima in Karafuto, showing him the orb-weaver spider through his cracked magnifying glass. ‘Poor thing,’ Uncle Zima had said, ‘poor thing. All those eyes, but, do you know what? It’s almost blind. It can only see the vaguest shapes of things. That’s why it has to spend its life spinning and re-spinning such stupendous webs, in the hope that its prey will just blunder into them.’
Jun was walking down the hill towards Ueno Park now, past the entrance to the narrow roadway that led towards the walled mansion with its signpost at the gate. Tokyo Anglican Theological College. He should have been feeling afraid. It was quite possible that he might bump into Goto or one of the other Z Unit agents here. But strangely, he felt nothing. Now that it had come to this point, he had lost his fear of them. The road to the mansion was dark and empty, and the house itself invisible, shielded by its wall of trees, but Jun could imagine the lights behind its shuttered windows, and the empty bottles strewn around the upstairs room: the colonel and his friends laughing and toasting the success of another operation.
In Ueno Park, strings of lanterns had been hung out around the lotus ponds, and young people were strolling the pathways with parasols opened to protect their summer kimonos from the rain. A white-garbed veteran with blank, sightless eyes was playing the accordion outside the Benten Temple. Jun heard a crackle of fireworks from somewhere in the distance, and smelled the sweet smell of burning soy sauce from the food stalls. A small child ran past him, his face beaming with delight as he waved a colourful paper windmill in one hand. No one paid the slightest attention to Jun, or to the blue holdall that he carried very carefully over one arm. He was surprised how light it was.
* * *
Beyond the park, Jun headed uphill again into an area of the city he had never been to before. The road was tree-lined, and suddenly very quiet. He reached the top of the hill, and gazed around in confusion. There were no houses in front of him, just an expanse of darkness in which he could faintly make out figures moving around by lamplight. The only sound to be heard was the clamour of cicadas. It was as though he had stepped out of the city and into some other world. The road skirted around an enclosure surrounded by a low stone wall, but a little way along there was a gap in the wall that opened on to a paved pathway.
Following the pathway, Jun found himself walking through a small grove of stunted pines that filled the warm night air with their resinous scent. Further on, there was something that looked at first like a forest of lopped bamboos. But then, as he drew nearer, Jun realized that the shapes he could see in the gloom were not natural but made by human hands: a mass of stone and wooden grave markers. The place he had entered was not a park at all. It was a huge cemetery.
At the foot of one imposing tomb, a couple of women were squatting with a lamp and a wooden bucket placed between them, chatting quietly as they scrubbed the stonework. Of course. They were preparing the place for the return of the spirits. Soon they would be lighting lanterns for the Festival of Souls.
For a moment, Jun felt tempted to find a seat somewhere in a corner of the graveyard and spend the night there. There was something soothing about its enveloping darkness. But he knew that he had to keep moving. He couldn’t do this on his own. Somehow, he had to get help.
On the far side of the graveyard, the landscape abruptly changed again, into a maze of tiny unpaved alleyways lined by ramshackle houses cobbled together from boards and corrugated iron and sheets of tarpaper. Here, everything was filled with light and noise and crowds. There was a tiny grocery shop on a street corner, and Jun hesitated, wondering whether he ought to buy some milk or a bag of rice for gruel. But shelter for the night seemed more important, so instead he wandered through the alleyways, rapidly losing his sense of direction. The doors of many of the shacks were open, and people were sitting out on benches under the shelter of eaves or porchways, chatting and fanning themselves and drinking from unlabelled bottles. The air was thick with smells of grilled food and open drains.
‘Hey brother! Been shopping?’ one young man shouted to Jun as he passed, and his companions laughed.
When Jun rounded the corner at the end of that street, he found that he had come to a dead end. The road was a cul-de-sac, blocked by a wooden house that was slightly larger than its neighbours and had a sign over the door reading Saishu Guest House. There was no other information outside the building, and the place was shabby and dimly lit, but Jun hammered on the door and waited until, after what seemed like a very long time, there was a shuffling of feet inside. The door was opened by a woman whose sun-darkened face, wrinkled like a prune, was framed by a halo of incongruously permed grey hair.
‘What do you want?’ barked the woman suspiciously, glancing at Jun’s blue holdall.
‘Have you got a spare room for the night?’ asked Jun.
‘No,’ said the woman. ‘Full up.’ And she started to close the door again, but Jun already had one foot across the threshold.
‘Please,’ he implored. ‘I’ve nowhere to go. Just a corner of a room will do. I can pay.’
He dug in his pocket and produced a 500-yen note. The woman reached out a bony hand as though to snatch it from him.
‘I guess I could fit you in just for tonight,’ she said. ‘It’s pay in advance. I’ll need you to be out by eight in the morning.’ She spoke with a thick accent. Jun assumed that she was Korean.
He slipped off his shoes and the woman, without bothering to provide him with any slippers, led him along a narrow corridor to the back of the house and slid open a door. Inside was a tiny windowless room — little more than a cupboard, really — completely devoid of furniture and barely big enough for him to lie in. Jun could hear the sound of chickens clucking on the other side of the thin wooden wall.
‘There’s a toilet and a tank of water in the courtyard at the back. I’ll get you some bedding,’ muttered the landlady.
But then a slight sound attracted her attention to the holdall, which Jun had carefully placed in a corner of the room.
‘What the hell’ve you got in there?’ asked the woman sharply, pulling open the broken zip on the bag with an expression of astonishment on her face.
Jun leaned against the plywood wall of the room and covered his face with his hands.
‘Please,’ he implored. ‘You have to help me. My wife has just left me.’
And he began to cry.
CHAPTER 19
Lying on their futon that night, Elly was aware of Fergus’ tense, unnaturally still body next to hers. He was stretched on his back, staring silently into the darkness. Elly wanted to comfort him, but was too exhausted to find the right words. Surprisingly, she fell asleep quite quickly and slept until after eight, pursued by uneasy dreams that she forgot the moment she awoke.
When she opened her eyes, she realized that Fergus was up already. She could hear him moving around in the front room, and the sound of the kettle singing on the stove. For a few seconds, it seemed like a normal day, when she could go back to preparing her English conversation lessons and planning h
er trip to the children’s home. But then the events of the previous evening came back to her, hitting her with a force like a blow to the stomach.
She got up slowly, retied the sash of her summer yukata and walked into the front room, where Fergus was sitting at the table, staring at something in his hands. At first, Elly thought that he was looking at a photo of Vida. But when she walked over to place her hands on Fergus’ shoulders, gently massaging his neck in a gesture of consolation, she realized that his eyes were fixed, not on a picture of the dead woman, but on one of Vida’s photos from China — the one with the dark thumbprint in the corner.
‘I though you gave those to the police,’ she said, startled and confused.
‘Not this one.’ Fergus’ voice was hesitant. ‘I, um . . . forgot to give them this one.’
‘Forgot?’
‘Yes. Honestly, Elly. I took this one out of the packet to look at in the taxi when I was on my way over to Vida’s apartment, and when the taxi stopped, I slipped it in my pocket, and then, well, I just didn’t think about it again.’
‘You’d better let the police know about it. Hand it over to them, please. Give it to them right away.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Fergus. ‘Is that really necessary? They’ve got two other photos almost identical to this one already.’
Elly wondered whether his reluctance stemmed from his fear of having to face another grilling by the police, or from his journalist’s urge to hang on to anything that might turn out to be raw material for a story. Or perhaps it was just that the photograph and the little purple book of poetry were the only traces of Vida that he still possessed.
She peered over his shoulder at the image. The Japanese men in the photo wore peaked military caps, while the Chinese man was wearing a panama hat. It was difficult to see the details of their faces.
She was about to argue with Fergus, try to persuade him to play safe by giving the photo to the police, when she was struck by another disquieting thought.
‘Fergus,’ she cried, ‘what about Ted? Who’s going to tell Ted what’s happened?’
She had a vivid image of Ted sitting in this room last month, with a look of intense sadness on his face at the thought of leaving Japan and Vida. Poor Ted. How would he cope with Vida’s death?
‘Have you got a telephone number where we could call him?’ she asked. ‘I suppose his parents must have a phone at home.’
‘Oh God! You’re right. Of course we ought to contact him immediately. It’s good you thought of it. But no, I haven’t got a phone number, only an address. We’ll have to send him a telegram. Could you do that, Elly?’
Before she set out to the post office, Elly tied a rather lurid headscarf that her mother had given her for her last birthday over her hair, and covered her mouth with a gauze mask, as though she were suffering from a summer cold. Luckily there was no sign of photographers outside their house, but you could never be too careful. She remembered the comic stories that Fergus and his journalist friends liked to tell about ambushing politicians or starlets involved in scandals: photographing them in awkward moments, catching them with incriminating grins or scowls on their faces. Until now, she had never seriously considered how it might feel to be on the receiving end of that game.
The newspaper kiosk near the post office had an array of this morning’s papers displayed on its metal stand. Elly glanced at them quickly, and then looked away again, but not before she had seen the photo of herself and Fergus on the front page of the Tokyo Times. They looked like startled rabbits caught in the headlights of a truck. Foreign Journalist Questioned over Woman’s Murder, ran the headline. Elly felt faintly sick.
She lowered her head and hurried into the post office, her mind composing the words for the telegram. How to convey a catastrophe in a handful of telegraphed words? In the end, she settled on Tragic news. Vida died yesterday. Please phone Tokyo 560278. Condolences. Love Fergus and Elly.
By the time she returned home, Fergus had retreated to his upstairs study, where he spent the time hammering away at his typewriter, coming down only briefly to eat and sleep. She didn’t like to ask him what he was writing.
Meanwhile, Elly kept turning over in her head the words she would say to Ted when he telephoned. But although the phone rang again and again with calls from Fergus’ editors and fellow journalists, there was no call from America.
* * *
When she stepped out of the little railway station at Oiso, Elly could instantly sense the presence of the sea. The bay itself was just out of sight, but there was a tang of salt and seaweed in the breeze, and a sharp edge to the bright summer sunlight. On the long journey out from Tokyo, she had watched excited family groups heading to the seaside, and had almost been able to imagine that she was one of them — just a carefree day tripper on an outing to the beach.
She needed this moment of escape. For the past three days she had done nothing but think about Vida, trying in vain to suppress the images that kept rising unbidden to the surface of her mind: images of the blotched face, the cord tangled in the long black hair . . . Fergus, having escaped into silence for the first day after Vida’s death, had then been able to talk about nothing else. He was obsessed by the fear that his article had somehow led to her killing, and kept coming back to the subject, however many times Elly tried to reassure him.
‘It’s not your fault. Of course it’s not your fault,’ she kept saying. But in fact, she was also wondering whether there could be a connection. In the interview with Fergus, Vida had spoken forthrightly, both about her horror at seeing the actions of the Japanese troops in China, and about her growing concern at the violence of the Chinese revolutionaries. Either side might have been angered by her comments.
Or perhaps her death had something to do with her involvement with political groups nearer home. It could even have been much more personal — Vida’s feud with her family, perhaps. Whatever it was, the killers had clearly been looking for something, and Elly had woken with a start in the middle of the previous night, suddenly panic-stricken at the idea that she and Fergus could be in danger too, because they still had that wretched photograph. A soon as Fergus was awake that morning, she had made him promise that he would hand it over to the police.
Meanwhile, Elly was desperate to lift the gloom that she could feel seeping through the core of her being. She had sunk into the icy darkness of depression before, and never wanted to go there again. So, to divert her mind from the bleak paths that it kept taking, she was going to see Maya once more, even if just for a few moments. Surely it could do no harm. The sight of the child’s solemn, vulnerable little face would strengthen her resolve. The more she thought about it, the more Elly was beginning to hope that all was not lost. The fact that their photo had been in the papers didn’t make them criminals. As far as she knew, they weren’t even being treated as suspects. Surely they couldn’t be judged ineligible to be parents just because their faces had appeared in newspapers? She was not giving up her dreams of adoption so easily.
The children’s home was only a few minutes’ walk from the station, and Elly could remember the way from her previous visit. She passed a shop that she recognized, with colourful displays of bathing hats and tin buckets and spades in its window. On the opposite side of the road rose a high rocky bluff. Elly followed the road along the base of this rock until she reached a dark opening that looked from a distance like the mouth of a cave: the entrance to a tunnel that led directly under the bluff, coming out at the far side into the lush garden of the children’s home. She could recall the sense of hope and excitement she had felt as she walked through this tunnel on her first visit. It had reminded her of Alice in Wonderland — a dark passageway to a magical world beyond. Now, though, she felt entirely different — weary and fuzzy-headed. She supposed that it was the stress and shock of the past few days. Halfway through the dark tunnel, she was gripped by an irrational fear that she would reach the far end and find herself somewhere completely unfamiliar — the c
hildren’s home might have vanished, and she might be heading into some strange and threatening other world.
But of course, it was still there. There was the wicket gate at the far end of the tunnel, and beyond, the dazzling green of the lawn. The gate was only waist-high, but was fastened shut with an iron padlock. The lawn on the other side was dotted here and there with azalea bushes and big cedar trees that spread patches of shade across the grass. Sitting in the shade of one of these trees was a woman in a white uniform, who was reading a story about the rabbit in the moon to a group of five small infants seated on the lawn around her feet. Maya was not among them, but there was something enchantingly peaceful about the sight of the children gathered on the soft grass, their faces puzzled and wondering as they gazed up at the adult in their midst. Elly was reluctant to interrupt, and waited until the storyteller had reached the end of her tale before calling out, ‘Hello, there. Might I have a word with the matron, if she’s available? My name’s Elly Ruskin.’
The woman looked up, surprised.
‘Have you got an appointment?’ she asked.
‘No,’ replied Elly, ‘but Matron will know my name. I’ve visited your home before at the invitation of Madame Sawada. I’m just hoping I might have a quick chance to see one of the children here. Maya.’
The woman rose from her seat and addressed herself firmly to the eldest of the children. ‘Now, you stay here. Hiro-kun, do you understand? You keep an eye on the others. You can play on the lawn, but don’t go on to any of the paths. I’m just going in to the house to look for Matron. I’ll be back in five minutes.’
While she waited for the woman to return, Elly stood outside the gate, watching the children. She was astonished by their demure behaviour. In the classroom at Tatura Internment Camp where she had taught during the war, the children would invariably erupt into a riot of shrieks and laughter and paper projectiles the moment the teacher’s back was turned. But these children continued to sit where they were on the lawn, gravely playing with a couple of little toy metal jeeps, which they rolled back and forth across the grass to one another. When the smallest child, a rosy-cheeked little thing of about two, attempted to snatch one of the jeeps out of her playmate’s hand, the boy called Hiro stepped in, restoring the toy to its rightful user and admonishing the culprit with almost comically adult authority — ‘No, Ma-chan. It’s not your turn yet. Everyone has to wait for their own turn.’
THE LANTERN BOATS an utterly gripping and heart-breaking historical novel set in post-war Japan (Historical Fiction Standalones) Page 18