His smiling eyes stared at her, as though daring her to contradict him. She stared back, and opened her mouth to speak. But then she thought of the baby, and of what Fergus had said about the police. Don’t make waves, she thought. Let it be. There is still one photo remaining.
She gave the policeman her sweetest smile in return.
‘Thank you so very much for taking the time to see me,’ she said calmly.
‘No, no, Mrs Ruskin,’ he replied, rising and giving her a very small bow, ‘on the contrary, we are the ones who should be thanking you.’
CHAPTER 27
The blue airmail envelope appeared on the doormat three weeks after Mother’s death. Elly picked it up, and her heart gave a little jolt as she saw the Indian stamp and recognized the sprawling handwriting. She slit the envelope open, but then decided that she didn’t feel ready to read the letter yet, so she stuffed it into her handbag and took it with her when she set off with the baby for a walk in Ueno Park.
The weather had suddenly turned cold in the past week, but the day was crisp and clear. The wind was stirring the dry lotus stems around the edges of the ponds in the park. She found a bench in a sunny corner, unwrapped the baby from his sling and sat him on her knee so that he could look out across the sunlit pond. He was cosily cocooned in a warm woollen cardigan and beamed with delight, waving his small fists in the air as she jiggled him on her knee.
With her one free hand Elly extracted the letter from her handbag and spread it open on the bench beside her. A couple of weeks before Mother’s death, when it was clear that the end was close, Elly had suddenly decided that she needed to write to her father. Whatever he may have done, he had after all been married to Mother for almost twenty years, and had — for part of that time, at least — loved her in his own way. He had a right to know that his first wife was dying. It had been a complicated process discovering his address, but Elly had found it in the end with some help from the trusty Fred Quincy at the British Liaison Mission, and had sent off a rather formal and stilted little message, not really expecting any reply.
Strangely enough, in the past few weeks she had found herself thinking more often about Father. For years, she had been so filled with rage at his betrayal of the family that she had only been able to recall the dark memories of his absences, his deceits, his infidelities. But now, with the passage of time, she was starting to remember that there had been happy moments too. There had been the times when Father had burst through the door on his return from trips to Batavia or Singapore, rushing to hug her and Ken, and to tease them with anticipation of the surprise presents hidden in his luggage. Wonderful presents. A heart-shaped brass box with a glass gemstone in the centre for Elly. A fake scimitar with a jewelled handle for Ken. All left behind when they and Mother were arrested by the colonial police and then shipped out to Australia.
And then there had been the time when Father decided that he needed to take his children’s education in hand, and taught them little fragments of the British civilization that he felt they were missing at school. There had been long Sunday afternoons on the terrace of their bungalow with Father reciting wonderful stories from classical mythology, and tales of wicked King John and of Robert the Bruce. From this distance in time, Elly could start to see Father as a weak and deeply flawed man, but still as a man who was, at his best, capable of kindness and affection.
Father’s reply to Elly’s letter was quite long, and for now she read just the first few sentences.
Dearest Elly, he had written, I am so sad to hear the news about my beautiful Rie. I think of you all every day, and am filled with regret at the way things turned out, and at the thought that you must be angry at me for my behaviour towards you all. I wish I could be with you and Ken now. Can you ever forgive me?
Perhaps, someday, thought Elly, though her cynical side wondered whether the expressions of regret and affection meant that Father’s second marriage wasn’t turning out too well either. It was a pity that it was too late for Mother to read this letter. But then again, Mother would probably have just torn it up or burned it.
Mother’s death had been very calm, with Elly and Ken by her side. To Elly’s utter astonishment, Ken had then quietly and efficiently taken over the tasks of organizing and even paying for the cremation and interment, and had now, without any prompting, volunteered to help Elly pack up her belongings and clean out the house at the foot of Atago-yama in preparation for her departure for Hong Kong. He had even repaid his debt to her by buying her and Jack’s tickets for the voyage. Elly suspected that this uncharacteristic behaviour was influenced by Ken’s new and stunningly attractive Japanese girlfriend as much as by his sadness and remorse at Mother’s death.
‘Excuse me, lady. Do you speak English?’ Elly’s thoughts were interrupted by an unmistakably American voice. She looked up to see a large woman with a mass of dark curls surmounted by a little brown felt hat, standing in front of her.
When Elly nodded, the woman continued, ‘I’m trying to find my way to Ueno Station, but I seem to have got lost. Can you help me?’
Elly took the baby in her arms and stood up, so that she could point out the direction to the woman.
‘You want to go right across the park until you meet the main path that runs along at the bottom of the embankment. Turn right and go past the temple steps, and you’ll come out at the street corner right opposite the station,’ she said.
‘Well, thank you,’ replied the woman. ‘You sure speak good English.’ Then, looking at the baby, ‘What a little cutie. A little boy, is he? What’s his name?’
‘Spero,’ said Elly.
‘Spiro?’ said the woman, mishearing. ‘That’s unusual. I used to know a Spiro once, back home in Cedar Rapids. A real neat guy, he was. Ran the local cinema. Italian, I think, or maybe it was Greek. You’re not Italian by any chance, are you?’
‘No,’ said Elly with a smile.
‘Well you sure have been a great help, honey,’ said the woman.
With Spero growing drowsy as he rested his head on her shoulder, Elly walked up and down beside the pond. A mother was standing by the shore with three small children, helping them launch homemade boats with paper sails on its murky water. There were shrieks of laughter and fear as the boats were pushed off from the bank, and the smallest of the children had to be grabbed roughly by one arm to stop her from tumbling into the pond. A gust of wind caught the boats and whisked them out into deeper water, bumping against one another as they went.
She herself and her husband and child, Elly felt, were rather like those crudely made toy boats, driven by the wind, who knew where or how far. Bandung, Tatura, Tokyo and now Hong Kong . . . She was going to miss this place when they left. Fergus had sent her long enthusiastic letters about the little house where they would live on Victoria Peak, with its view of the ferries and fishing boats in Victoria Harbour; about the restaurants he was planning to take her to when she joined him; and about the assorted eccentrics who haunted the halls of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. He’d been doing more research on Mr Ogiri, getting closer to the truth, he said, though Elly wondered whether his researches would ever see the light of day. When Fergus had cautiously broached the topic with his editor, he had apparently received a stern reminder that the soon-to-be politician was highly respected in Allied political circles, and that Japan had strict libel laws. Life in Hong Kong, at least, was not going to be boring.
They would come back to Japan at some point, of course. Spero would need to connect to his mother’s country, just as Elly needed to connect to hers. In a few months, the Allied occupation would be over, and Japan would be an independent country again. She wondered how it would fare. What sort of world would their son grow up in? ‘Cold War’: that was the term that people were using now, though thinking about what was happening in Korea, she couldn’t see that it was much different from all the wars before. They’d take him to America too, someday, once they had enough time and money, to get to know his other
father. When he grew older, they would tell him the story of his birth. How will I tell that story, Elly wondered, when the time comes? What will I include and what will I leave out? How much will he figure out for himself?
Even though she had never really known Vida, Elly somehow hoped that Vida’s son might learn to know and admire the mother whom he would never remember.
She went back to the bench to finish reading the letter from Father. Oddly, it was the memory of Father’s stories that had helped her choose her child’s name. She could only remember two of the many Greek legends that their father had recited to her and Ken, in dramatic tones with heavy emphasis on the disasters and violent deaths: the story of Persephone and the pomegranate seed, and the story of Pandora’s box. She, in turn, had told these two stories to the children in the camp in Tatura, and she had been reminded of Pandora’s box again when she first arrived in Tokyo with Mother and Ken.
Prometheus stole fire from the gods, and to punish him for his hubris, Zeus cursed him and his whole household by sending them Pandora, who opened the box that contained all the ills in the universe — war, destruction, hatred, mistrust, deceit, betrayal, sickness, death. All these evils flew out of the box like crows and roosted in every corner of the world. The only thing that remained in the box, curled invisible in its darkest corner, was the one shy, elusive thing that most feared the light of day — hope.
Elly went back to the bench and tried to take out Father’s letter again, but as she sat Spero on her knee, the baby caught sight of the flutter of blue paper and made a flailing grab in its direction. She whisked the letter out of his reach and Spero was just starting to whimper with disappointment when Elly heard a familiar voice.
‘I’m so sorry to disturb you again, honey,’ said the American woman, reappearing on the path in front of the bench, ‘but they were selling these things at a stall just along the way, and I just couldn’t resist getting one for your Spiro. He’s such a little doll.’
The woman was holding out a multicoloured paper windmill, which spun in the breeze. Spero shifted his attention from the fluttering blue of the letter to the rainbow whirl of the paper windmill, and the downward pout of his mouth was instantly transformed into a radiant smile. Elly held the windmill as close to his face as she could without actually allowing him to seize hold of it. She didn’t want him poking himself in the eye with its stick.
‘Thank you so much,’ said Elly, looking up at the woman with real gratitude. ‘That’s very sweet of you.’ But she couldn’t stop herself from adding, ‘Actually, his name is Spero. Espero, really, but Spero for short.’
‘Now that really is a unique name,’ said the woman. ‘Espero. I never heard that one before.’
THE END
Also by Tessa Morris-Suzuki
THE SEARCHER
AFTERWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Three characters in this work of fiction are based on real people. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Texan-born Colonel Jack Y. Canon headed Z Unit, a clandestine intelligence agency under the umbrella of the US occupation forces in Japan. Also known as ‘the Canon Organization’, the Unit was headquartered in one half of the grand Tokyo mansion that had formerly belonged to Baron Iwasaki, head of the Mitsubishi zaibatsu, while the other half was occupied by the Tokyo Anglican Theological College. Canon’s deputy, Korean military officer Yon Chong (also written Yeon Jeong or En Tei), appears briefly in Chapter 24. Sawada Miki, who appears in the early chapters of the book, was the daughter of Baron Iwasaki, and became a philanthropist particularly well known for founding the Elizabeth Saunders Home to care for children fathered by occupation force soldiers in Japan.
All the other characters and events in the book are fictional, though some of Kamiya Jun’s experiences are inspired by the true story of Itagaki Kozo, a Karafuto-born war orphan who arrived in Japan on a smuggling mission and was recruited to work for Colonel Canon’s Z Unit in Tokyo. Itagaki disappeared in Tokyo in 1953, immediately after giving public testimony about the illegal activities of Z Unit to a Japanese parliamentary committee.
In reimagining the lives of agents in Canon’s underground organization, I have drawn on an interview with the remarkable Yamada Zenjiro, who worked as a cook for Colonel Canon and his unit before turning whistle-blower and revealing the unit’s role in kidnapping suspected leftists and in the transfer of prisoners of war from the Korean War front to Japan for interrogation and espionage missions. Yamada went on to spend the rest of his life working to support victims of miscarriages of justice in Japan. His reminiscences are recorded in a number of publications, including his book Amerika no Supai, CIA no Hanzai (2011). My thanks go to him and also to the many other writers and researchers who have helped me to understand occupation-era Japan: among them Walter Hamilton, whose book Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story (2012) depicts the lives of the children born to Australian servicemen in occupation-era Japan (including those who grew up in the Elizabeth Saunders Home). Takemae Eiji’s Inside GHQ: The Allied Occupation of Japan and Its Legacy (2002) and John Dower’s Embracing Defeat (1999) are comprehensive sources of knowledge on this era. I also learned much from reading Sawada Miki’s autobiographical works Kuroi Hada to Shiroi Kokoro (1963 — the source of Sawada’s description of the dead baby on the train) and Kuroi Jujika no Agasa (1967). Erik Esselstrom’s essay ‘From Wartime Friend to Cold War Fiend: The Abduction of Kaji Wataru and US-Japan Relations at Occupation’s End’ (Journal of Cold War Studies, 2015) gives a wonderful insight into the politics surrounding Z Unit, while his ‘The Life and Memory of Hasegawa Teru: Contextualizing Human Rights, Trans/Nationalism and the Antiwar Movement in Modern Japan’ (Radical History Review, 2008) sheds light on the little-known story of Japanese poet and Esperantist Hasegawa Teru (aka Verda Majo), who spent the war years in China. Andrew T. McDonald and Verlaine Stoner McDonald’s book Paul Rusch in Postwar Japan (2018) is also a rich source of information on the group of people who came together in the former Iwasaki Mansion during the occupation era.
The mansion still stands, and today is a museum, though its official publicity is reticent about its role in the occupation era. I visited the mansion several times before discovering the darker aspects of its past. Its story, and the story of the disappearance of Itagaki Kozo, have long haunted me. This novel is my attempt to bring to light some of the ghosts whose uneasy presences still haunt Japan, and East Asia more broadly, to the present day.
My warm thanks go to tutor Bernadette Foley and my fellow students on the Australian Writers’ Centre course ‘Novel Writing Essentials’, who provided very helpful suggestions and encouragement in the early stages of writing this book; and, as always, to Hiroshi and all my family, without whom none of this would be possible.
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