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

by TESSA MORRIS-SUZUKI

  ‘He’s so tiny,’ Haruko said, lifting her gaze from the infant she was feeding and giving Jun a shy smile, ‘and he has such lovely grey eyes. Your wife, is she foreign?’

  ‘Partly Russian,’ said Jun.

  ‘I think she must be very beautiful.’

  Jun thought of the Fox — the last time he’d seen her alive, far away on the perimeter of the airfield, embracing her American lover.

  ‘Yes, she was very beautiful.’ He realized too late that he had used the past tense, but Haruko didn’t seem to notice.

  He wanted to remember the Fox’s face the way he had seen her when she leaned across the table in the Shirokiya restaurant, or in the café where she had met the Rabbit — smiling, radiant, full of life — not the way he had seen her as she lay sprawled on the floor of her apartment, with bloodshot eyes still open. He had heard the frantic wailing sound and seen the body of the Fox almost at the same moment, so that for one dreadful moment his brain had been unable to separate the two things, even though it was obvious that the cry was far too high-pitched to be that of an adult, and could not have come from the Fox, who was unmistakably dead. It had taken him a little while to process the fact that the urgent crescendo of screams was coming from somewhere behind the panelled wall of the room.

  The sounds had quickly guided him to the hiding place, and when he had pressed a hand against the panelled wall, he discovered that one section had been cut loose and could easily be removed. The baby was lying in a laundry basket in the narrow recess within the wall cavity, its face scarlet and contorted with distress. There had been other things hidden there too: a pile of documents, and a bundle of letters tied with a ribbon, but Jun had simply lifted out the basket with the baby before slipping the loose wall panel back into place, ignoring everything else. The infant’s cries absorbed all his attention. His only thought was that he had to get the child to safety. What if the killers returned? Had they found what they were looking for? If they were hunting for the stash of papers hidden behind the wall, presumably they’d left empty-handed. The baby must, mercifully, have slept through the attack on the Fox and the ransacking of the apartment. Friends of the colonel would have had no qualms about dealing with a baby.

  The infant had screamed and wriggled with surprising strength in his arms as Jun lifted it — too roughly — into the blue holdall, but then, once he closed the holdall and headed down the stairs and into the street, it had fallen silent surprisingly quickly.

  * * *

  Jun felt peaceful and secure in the kitchen of the Saishu Guest House, despite the heat and the flies that made their way through gaps in the ill-fitting windows. Haruko’s own two children — a little girl of about three and a boy of about five — were playing hide-and-seek: darting in and out of the kitchen with giggles and muffled shrieks of delight, as their mother nursed the little stranger.

  ‘Gen-chan, stop that!’ Haruko would say from time to time. ‘Mind that table. You’re going to break something, or hurt yourselves.’

  But she spoke with little conviction, and her words only had the effect of making the children’s frenetic energy subside for a few moments. They started their wild game again the moment their mother turned her attention back to the baby. Haruko spoke to her children mostly in Japanese, and to Grandma Ko mostly in Korean, which Jun could not really understand, apart from recognising the odd word that he had picked up from Korean families in Karafuto, or during his time on the Tsushima-Maru, when the boat docked in Pusan.

  There seemed to be about eight or nine other people, all of them men, staying in the guest house, though Jun found it difficult to work out which of the people who wandered at random in and out of the kitchen and the tiny adjoining common room were guests, and which were neighbours or members of Grandma Ko’s extended family. Jun had seen no sign of a Grandpa Ko, and wondered whether he existed, but didn’t like to ask.

  On the third day of Jun’s stay, he left the baby in Haruko’s care, and Grandma Ko lent him a tricycle with a metal box fixed between its rear wheels, and sent him off around the local restaurants to collect scrapings of rice and barley, leftover root vegetables and scraps of bread.

  ‘May as well make yourself useful while you’re here,’ she said.

  The bicycle had a wobbly front wheel, and Jun found it difficult to ride. In the cloying August heat, his body was soon drenched in sweat. But all the same, he enjoyed bumping and weaving his way around the twisting backroads, narrowly avoiding the makeshift street stalls, the throngs of children playing hopscotch or games of baseball, and the barrels of water and giant pickle jars jammed into corners outside ramshackle houses.

  At the first little restaurant where he stopped, a white-aproned woman at the front desk stared at him suspiciously at first, before summoning her husband, who emerged from the kitchen bare-chested, mopping his face with a ragged towel. He was built like a wrestler, Jun noticed: not tall but with alarmingly powerful muscles in his shoulders. The man glowered at Jun as he started to explain his business, but then broke into a wide, gap-toothed grin when Jun mentioned Grandma Ko’s name. He yelled something in the direction of the kitchen, and a few moments later a barefoot girl of about nine or ten emerged with a bucketful of scraps, which she tipped into Jun’s bicycle cart.

  There were plenty of others employed in the same trade, it seemed, because at a number of restaurants, Jun was met with a shrug of the shoulders. ‘Too late. All gone for today. Try again a bit earlier tomorrow morning,’ they would say. Still, there was a fair mound of pungent scraps in the cart — enough to make pedalling the rickety tricycle harder than ever — by the time he lurched his way back to the Saishu Guest House in the late afternoon, to be rewarded with a smile and a friendly slap on the back from Grandma Ko.

  Jun helped her to unload the scraps from the bicycle cart into big metal pails which they carried through the guest house and out into the earth-floored back yard, where the chickens were scratching the dusty earth in a wire-mesh cage. Some of the scraps went into the chickens’ cage, but most were carried to a wooden lean-to at the back of the yard. The moment he and Grandma Ko entered the lean-to, Jun was overcome by a smell that took him back to Karafuto, and the shed where, before the war, their neighbours the Zimnikovs had brewed homemade vodka from potatoes. Sure enough, in the middle of the lean-to was a large enamel bathtub full of an evil-looking, frothy brownish substance, while a great pot of vegetable mash sat cooking on a gas ring to one side.

  ‘Saishu Guest House finest vintage champagne,’ said Grandma Ko with a wink.

  Jun sampled the ‘vintage champagne’ that evening, as he sat with a group of half a dozen other men on the floor around the guest house table, eating braised pork trotters and fiery hot pickles. They were talking about professional wrestling and the Korean War armistice negotiations, and other things that Jun did not really understand. The baby Kunio was sleeping peacefully in a padded wooden box in the corner, oblivious to the shouts and laughter and occasional bursts of song from the dining table. The home-brewed liquor tasted of kerosene and felt almost strong enough to strip the skin off the roof of Jun’s mouth.

  He sat quietly, listening to the clamour of voices around him, and smiling from time to time at jokes that he only half understood. He could stay here, he was thinking. He could find some sort of job — something legal or semi-legal. If there was anywhere in Tokyo where he was safe from the attentions of Colonel Canon and his men, it was surely here, in these impenetrable alleyways. No one here seemed bothered about backgrounds or identity documents, or real names, for that matter. To be on the safe side, when he first arrived at the Saishu Guest House, Jun had given his name as Saito Tomio.

  But then there was the baby. He knew, without anyone telling him, that Haruko couldn’t go on caring for the baby indefinitely. She had her own children to look after, and she needed to earn a living. Jun had no money to pay her, and although he was not afraid of the colonel’s men here, he was worried about the Japanese police. Grandma Ko had t
old him that they came snooping around from time to time, sniffing out undocumented migrants and bootleg alcohol. If they found a baby with no documents, no mother and an unemployed ‘father’ with no official registration papers, they would probably take Kunio away and put him into a children’s home somewhere.

  There was one other way out. It was a huge risk, he knew, but it was the only thing he could think of that might work. It might give the baby some kind of protection. The idea had started to form in his brain as he watched the Fox’s apartment building from a distance on the night of her death, waiting to find out what would happen next, and had seen Mrs Ruskin running down the road to get help, and almost called out to her . . .

  One of the older men cut into his thoughts now, leaning across the table and saying, ‘How about a song from you, my lad? It’s your turn to give us a tune.’

  Jun hesitated for a moment, and then started to sing ‘Katyusha’ in his slightly reedy voice. Most of the others seemed to know it, with various different versions of the words, and soon all of them were joining in, clapping their hands and thumping on the table as Jun pushed the tempo of the song faster and faster, until finally Kunio woke up and began to howl, and the song collapsed into laughter.

  * * *

  The next day, Jun told Grandma Ko that he planned to leave the guest house that evening. He was sitting in the kitchen helping her shell peas, wearing a threadbare borrowed yukata while his only shirt, which the landlady had put in the wash, was hanging near the stove to dry.

  ‘Have you got somewhere to go to? Are you and the baby going to be all right?’ she asked, but Jun noticed that she didn’t try to persuade him to stay, and he guessed that, despite all her hospitality, she and Haruko would be quietly relieved to get rid of their uninvited guests. They seemed, after all, to have plenty of problems of their own to deal with.

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ replied Jun. ‘I’ve an aunt who lives near Shinbashi. She’ll be able to help us out for a while.’

  ‘What about that wife of yours?’ asked Grandma Ko. ‘Any hope of her coming back?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Jun. ‘No. I don’t think she’ll be coming back.’

  ‘Stupid woman, eh?’ said Grandma Ko with a grin. ‘Never mind. You’ll find someone better, I’m sure, handsome lad like you.’

  She wanted to give him a basket to carry the baby in, but he said he would rather use the blue canvas holdall. It was just the right size, and he could zip it shut, leaving a little gap for the baby to breathe through, if it started to rain. Also, though he didn’t mention this, the holdall was less conspicuous. He had no idea how things were going to play out when he reached his destination.

  When darkness started to fall, he changed back into his almost dry shirt and student uniform, settled his accommodation bill and said his farewells to Grandma Ko and Haruko.

  ‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ he said. ‘What would I have done without you?’

  Now it came to the point, he felt a sudden reluctance to leave, but it seemed too late to change his mind. He noticed a tear in Haruko’s eye as she placed a gentle kiss on Kunio’s forehead.

  ‘Come back and see us when you’re settled, and bring the little one with you,’ said Grandma Ko.

  ‘I will,’ promised Jun, though he felt almost sure that he would never see them again.

  Then he bowed and waved farewell, and set off, with the holdall over one arm, walking back in the direction of the city centre.

  CHAPTER 21

  ‘Is it yours?’ Elly asked, as Fergus sat at the table eating a slice of watermelon for his breakfast. She had lain awake all night, gathering the courage to ask that question. She didn’t want to do it. She was afraid that the question was ridiculous, and she was scared of the possible reaction. But if she didn’t ask, it would weigh forever on her mind.

  ‘What?’ said Fergus, pausing with the wedge of melon halfway to his juice-smeared mouth.

  ‘The baby,’ said Elly. ‘Vida’s baby. Are you — is it possible that you could be — the father?’

  ‘No!’ The word came out as an explosion, and Fergus’ face flushed bright red. ‘What are you thinking of, Elly? How could you even ask such a thing? It must be Ted’s baby, of course. Who else’s could it possibly be?’

  But there was something too brittle about his flash of anger, and she heard his voice falter. She waited, and he looked away.

  After a very long silence he said quietly, ‘Only one time, Elly. I promise you. We only did it once.’

  ‘When?’ She too kept her voice quiet and deliberately calm.

  He paused for a moment, and then said, ‘April, I think it must have been. So I couldn’t possibly be . . . She must already have been . . . Oh God, Elly, I am so very, very sorry. It was a moment of madness. I don’t even know why I let myself do that. You know I’ve never really loved anyone except you. Never will. It was just— I don’t know . . . Something about her . . .’

  He stood up, wiping the juice from his hands on his shirt front, and walked towards her, as though to embrace her, but she held up one hand to stop him.

  ‘Don’t, Fergus,’ she said. ‘Not now. Just give me time. I need to think. We need to think. We have to speak to Ted. Someone must know what’s happened to that poor child.’

  She thought then, suddenly, about the Elizabeth Saunders Home, and the stories she’d heard on her first visit: stories of little bundles that the staff had found on more than one occasion, placed at the end of the tunnel that linked the home’s gardens to the outside world — abandoned babies left there by their desperate mothers. Was it possible that Vida had done something like that? Surely not. She couldn’t imagine Vida giving her own child away, least of all to a Christian charitable institution.

  In any case, she didn’t want to discuss this with Fergus. She didn’t, at that moment, want to talk to him at all. She wanted to be alone, to have space to herself to think and absorb the hopeless tangle of feelings that threatened to overwhelm her.

  ‘Please, Elly,’ Fergus was saying. ‘Please can you forgive me. I love you. I’ll do anything to make up for it.’

  She turned away and started clearing the table.

  ‘Just leave it now, Fergus. I don’t want to talk about it now. Go away. Go to work.’ She sounded cold and false, even to herself: like a character from some awful Hollywood movie.

  He hesitated, looking at her as though he wanted to say something more, but in the end simply picked up his satchel and put on his shoes.

  ‘I love you, Elly,’ he said again, as he left the house.

  It was only after he was gone that she recognized the emotion that tightened the muscles of her throat and restricted her breathing. It was not anger or jealousy or a sense of betrayal. It was sadness — disappointment. For just a moment, she had desperately wished that Fergus would prove to be the baby’s father. It would have given her hope.

  * * *

  The telephone call finally came around four o’clock that afternoon.

  When she lifted the receiver, she heard a crackling, and the unfamiliar voice of the operator saying, ‘Am I speaking to a Mrs Fergus Ruskin?’ And then, when she confirmed her name, ‘You have a person-to-person call from the United States. Go ahead, caller.’

  Ted’s first words were, ‘Elly, what’s happened to the baby?’

  ‘You knew about the baby?’ asked Elly, realizing how stupid her words sounded the moment she had uttered them.

  ‘Of course I knew. That was why I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to be with Vida and our child, but she said she would be fine on her own. She wanted to bring her child up herself. What happened?’ His voice faltered and she had to strain her ears to catch what he was saying. ‘I had word from a friend in the State Department. He told me about what happened to Vida, but he couldn’t tell me anything about the baby. Did the baby die too?’

  ‘We don’t know what happened, Ted,’ said Elly. ‘It was Fergus who found Vida’s body, but there was no baby there. The
police said she must have given birth about a week before she died. Could she have given the baby to someone else to be cared for — a friend or relative or someone?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Ted. ‘She’d broken off contact with most of her family, except her younger sister. She was so determined that she was going to raise her child herself. She never believed in conventional families. She was excited. Looking forward to it, in spite of all the difficulties.’ His voice seemed about to break, but he continued, ‘I can’t imagine her giving her baby to anybody else.’

  ‘But she didn’t tell anyone she was going to have a child,’ said Elly. ‘Why ever not? Nobody but you seems to have even known she was pregnant. Of course, I should have realized when I met her, but I didn’t. It just didn’t occur to me, and Vida said nothing about it.’

  Elly remembered how she’d vaguely sensed, when they’d had lunch in Kanda, that Vida looked different from the way she remembered her: her face a little plumper, her body more rounded. But the flowing dresses that Vida always wore had been, she now realized, the best disguise.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ted. I’m so desperately sorry,’ she said. ‘I let you both down. I should have done something to help her.’

  ‘Of course you didn’t, Elly. None of this is your fault,’ replied Ted. ‘I should have told you more about what was going on, but I’d promised Vida not to. She wanted to keep her news to herself for as long as she could. She’d been seeing a gynaecologist, and had a midwife to help her. I made sure of that, at least. It was the midwife who cabled me to let me know that the baby had been born. She said everything was OK. But Vida didn’t want others to know until after the birth. I didn’t really understand it myself, but then again, Vida always did have her own way of doing everything. Actually, I think it was partly a kind of fear — almost superstition. You wouldn’t think that Vida was the superstitious type, but sometimes she could be. Her best friend in China died in childbirth. That really affected Vida. I think, in a way . . . she couldn’t believe in the reality of her own child until she had seen it and held it in her own arms.’ He broke off suddenly and then corrected himself, ‘Not it. He. He was, he is, a little boy.’