Foreigners, Drunks and Babies

by Peter Robinson

  ‘Well – actually – poetry,’ I said with a defensive smile.

  ‘Ah,’ my new acquaintance Dr Miyazaki had returned, ‘so you do not have a specialist field.’

  ‘No, I suppose I don’t,’ I admitted, to nip that toxic topic in the bud.

  Not furnishing him with expected answers may have been what made him seek me out, though. Certainly our acquaintance had blossomed, and was now one of many years’ standing.

  ‘So what are you teaching in your classes this semester?’ he asked. The graduate girl with a voice like a disappearing mosquito had been asked by Professor Yoneyama to change places so Toshi could have a word with his old acquaintance. She had done so with a cringing bow.

  Given the requirement was to teach six classes, usually described in the course handbooks as either Reading or Conversation, there were, in effect, no restrictions on what you could teach. So the question did have a point, and would reveal a thing or two about the interests of the person to whom it was asked. The problem with my answer, however, was that since Toshi hadn’t read any of the obscure poets I was introducing to my students that autumn, the conversation faltered and died right there. So he graciously offered me one of the new dishes heaving into view on the revolving platform. I took another sip of my Asahi Dry.

  ‘What’s Brook doing with my old job?’ I asked, to start another patch of conversation.

  ‘He left the country earlier this year,’ is exactly what Toshi then replied.

  ‘What about his wife?’ I asked. ‘Has she gone with him? The last I heard she had an assistant’s post at the Buddhist University …’

  ‘I can’t say.’

  But why did the mention of Aiko always seem to produce such blank absences of news or information? I couldn’t say I hadn’t noticed it before.

  ‘She had a junior lectureship there,’ said Toshi, ‘but I never knew her.’

  ‘So what’s Brook doing then? Is he on leave?’ I asked, thinking this might at last hit a vein of gossip that, with the inebriation, could kick-start a bit of an exchange.

  Alan Brook, another of Professor Sakai’s recruits who had come to teach in Toshi’s department, was Aiko’s husband. Concerned about her welfare as Finals and Graduate School entrance approached, I had introduced them about ten years before, when about to leave for a vacation with Gill back in Islington.

  ‘He always kept to himself,’ said Toshi, with a more than usually expressionless look. ‘I don’t know what he is doing.’

  ‘Yes,’ I came back, warming to the theme, ‘Professor Sasayama said a very true thing about their mysterious relationship. What they had in common, he said, was that neither is good at either making or keeping friends. Don’t you think that’s exactly right? I haven’t heard a thing from them for two or three years now.’

  ‘You don’t know?’ He had leant towards me and lowered his voice to a whisper.

  ‘Know what?’ I asked.

  ‘She died.’

  The vein of genial gossip turned to ice within me. The sociable meal around us had been cast into a distant relief.

  ‘How? What happened? Was it a car crash? Or what?’

  ‘She killed herself,’ said Toshi with the very same absence of feeling that in this case seemed to express his reluctance to talk.

  ‘Why? What for? When did it happen?’

  ‘In the middle of September.’

  Five weeks ago, I thought, and no one had thought to tell me.

  ‘How? How come?’

  ‘She hanged herself with a scarf,’ said Toshi.

  ‘But why?’ I asked, incredulous. ‘Everything was going so well for her: the marriage, the baby, the doctorate, and a permanent job to cap it all …’

  ‘I cannot say any more,’ Toshi answered, distinctly uncomfortable, ‘not here.’

  I must have looked horror-struck, visibly upset both by the bare fact and lack of an explanation.

  ‘After my course finishes … tomorrow,’ he added, ‘perhaps I may come to your office?’

  As promised, Toshi Miyazaki knocked at my brown metal door sometime a little after five the following afternoon. Moving a heap of books and papers down to a still empty space on the floor, I offered him a department leatherette armchair.

  ‘I don’t know a lot about it,’ he said, after a word or two on how his course had gone. ‘I’m head of the teaching committee this year, and the Dean phoned me to say that Brook had resigned his post – because his wife died. It was just two weeks before the start of the semester. The Dean asked me to organize some part-time teaching to make up the students’ credits. It was most inconvenient, most inconsiderate of him.’

  There was nothing I could do with that. His Japanese wife had died, and he had left the country.

  ‘So where’s their daughter?’ I asked, wondering about the extended family she had taken me to visit for the first of my Japanese New Years.

  ‘She left the country with him.’

  ‘But did you talk to Alan before he left, about what happened, I mean?’

  ‘No,’ said Toshi. ‘It was the Dean who told me she had committed suicide.’

  ‘But surely you spoke to Alan about his classes and that?’

  ‘We spoke on the phone … He said he didn’t want to talk about the tragedy. He was seeing his lawyers in Tokyo, making arrangements to sell their property and leave Japan as quickly as possible …’

  ‘Where is he now, do you know?’

  ‘I believe he has returned to Oxford – with the little daughter.’

  ‘You don’t happen to have an address for him by any chance, do you?’

  ‘No – but I’m sure the Dean will have his contact details.’

  ‘Perhaps I’ll try and get in touch with him,’ I said, not knowing where I’d begin or what I could possibly ask in a letter to a person who had barely confided in me at all.

  Toshi Miyazaki had a Bullet Train to catch, and excused himself a few moments later, saying if I were passing through Kyoto that New Year I should get in touch – because, perhaps, he would know a little more by then.

  So there I was standing in the middle of my chaos trying to manage the mixture of upset and bafflement that Aiko’s death had caused. She’d been the first to befriend me all those years before. It was almost immediately after I ‘materialized myself’ by the exit gate at Itami Airport in Osaka. That’s what Sakai had asked me to do, and with that very verb. Alone in the country, with Gill remaining back home in North London to see how things developed, I was very short of company. My new colleagues seemed equally indifferent to my existence.

  This had a history too. Professor Sakai, my recruiter in London, was not exactly popular with his fellow academics. One of the things they held against him was his lack of formal inhibition. He was notorious for saying things about colleagues that should, conventionally, only have been hinted at when everyone had imbibed enough saké to excuse the impoliteness or indiscretion. There was almost a set amount of drink that had to be downed before the conversation could loosen up, and only then on the strict understanding that anything said in that inebriated state would be treated the next morning as if nothing of the kind had been uttered, as if none of the evening’s events had ever happened at all. The knack was, I finally realized, to manage your drink so as always to be slightly less drunk than those around you. That way you could learn a lot from the loose-tongued in your vicinity while rationing the drip-drip of gossip that would keep the flow alive.

  There was, in fact, a large clique in the department that defined itself in precise opposition to Sakai and his manipulatively uninhibited ways. They tended to be the younger specialists in American literature, and regarded the older professor’s promotion of British culture in the department as a reactionary harking back to the pre-war world of Edmund Blunden, Ralph Hodgson, William Empson and their like. My sponsor had, however, realized perfectly well that by being identified as the ‘friend’ of the British visiting professors he made it even more difficult for them to
integrate with the rest of the department, and had warned me to be equally amicable and helpful to all, not to side with one faction or another on any single issue, and even to go out of my way to try and socialize with the younger crowd. But the net effect was that all of them left me entirely alone.

  Aiko Mori had, at the very same time, come back from a year in America. She had been studying English in a small community college somewhere in Idaho. Now she was back in Kyoto for the final year of her Literature degree. Doubtless with the idea of keeping up her newly improved English, she had gone along to the native-speaking professor’s first class in the Faculty of Arts. I remembered that familiar sinking feeling as it seemed there would be only two students enrolled on the course, one of whom, a silent boy, didn’t seem able to answer the simplest of questions. Fortunately the other, the diminutive Aiko (so thin you could think if she turned sideways she’d disappear), was more than ready to respond – and with a frank enthusiasm I would come to understand was dangerously un-Japanese.

  Adjourning to the Clark House café with my two Arts students, I was glad to hear Aiko explain the temporary timetable clash. That’s how Aiko Mori came to occupy a peculiar place in my recessed affections. She’d befriended me when I felt totally alone. A shoebox among the office detritus contained some photos from those far-off Kyoto years.

  ‘Do you think anyone else will come?’ I had asked from the platform.

  The two students glanced at each other.

  ‘No, they will not,’ said the philosophy major, with his air of pronouncing a fact.

  ‘But it’s not because of you,’ Aiko immediately added. ‘There’s been a change in the schedule and many of the students won’t be able to come now; but I know a few who will come next week.’

  ‘I brought something for us to look at,’ I said, ‘but maybe it would be best then not to start just now. Why don’t we get out of this horrible room and have a cup of tea somewhere, since there’s only the three of us.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Aiko, after the two students had exchanged another glance.

  ‘Right,’ I said, ‘decided – but let me just write your names down in my register book.’

  It was Aiko who suggested we go to the coffee house opposite the Italian Cultural Institute that morning. As I later discovered, there was a Kyoto gaijin witticism about how the Italian Institute was a café, the Alliance Française a restaurant, the Goethe Institute a concert hall, the British Council a language school, and the American Center a cover for the CIA … But the Clark House, being right next to the Kyoto University campus, was to be the scene for many of our meetings. On that first day a waitress approached us and casually nodded a bow. I ordered a milk tea. The students ordered American coffee.

  ‘So have you been abroad,’ I asked, prompted by their order and the imitation boho surroundings.

  The philosophy student, deferred to by Aiko, briefly shook his head.

  ‘I was in the States last year,’ said Aiko.

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘Idaho and California,’ she replied.

  ‘Great,’ I repeated, and, conscious of cultivating her a little too enthusiastically, turned to the philosophy student to ask him a question about his interests in the field. The boy answered as best he could. Then I explained my plans for the year’s over-ambitious course on Anglo-American poetry from Hopkins to Ashbery … and expressed the hope that some more students would want to attend next week.

  ‘Interesting,’ said Aiko. ‘But in England, what do the students call their professors?’

  ‘Mostly by their first names,’ I replied. ‘Mine used to call me Robert. Some even called me Bob. But they usually call them “Dr So-and-so” if they don’t know them, or are talking about them with another lecturer.’

  ‘I think I’ll call you “Dr B”,’ said Aiko, friendly and familiar from the start.

  The Inland Sea was one great natural, womb-like harbour, and Shiraishijima the third stop on the ferry route. When finally our boat cast off and we were chugging down the estuary, past a cluttered shoreline of ramshackle boatyards and derelict wharves, my spirits, as was usual on such short boat trips, immediately began to lift. Onboard were a few shoppers who’d gone to the mainland for supplies. There were some teenagers lolling in the stern: smoking, munching junk food, drinking from cans and throwing their litter straight over the side.

  ‘And they like to think they love nature,’ said Gill.

  ‘The perpetual pursuit of dainty,’ I said, quoting the slogan for a chain of coffee and cake shops, my mood continuing to improve as we reached the deceptively open sea.

  ‘I blame the drinks dispensers,’ said Gill, wrinkling her nose at the drift of smoke from the school kids in the stern. Her need to complain remained unsatisfied, but my lifting mood didn’t want to go there – and I preferred instead to watch cargo boats passing between the islands.

  The weather had turned vicious. It was freezing cold, with a rolling swell. Gill wasn’t enjoying the buffeting either and had now gone to sit inside the cabin. I stood holding onto a rail towards the bow, letting the brief sea voyage do its work. Shiraishijima could be made out up ahead, already a spot on the far horizon.

  The island turned out to be an oval of flat, cultivated ground ringed with an arch of steep hills. It was the remnant of a small volcanic cone. In the flat oval there were some narrow lanes of houses near the ferry port where we docked, lanes thinning out to a few tiny rice fields, seaweed-drying platforms and shellfish industries. The buildings were traditional, made of dark-stained wood, but not like the centre of Kyoto. They were poor, ramshackle-seeming, with a store or two and one tiny noodle shop which stood beyond the pier. There had to be a quarry somewhere in the ring of hills, for a lorry stood parked beside the dock loaded with pale stone slabs. Shiraishijima: White Stone Island, it meant.

  Disembarked, its key collected from the ferry ticket office, we were making our way through those narrow streets towards the International Villa. The very existence of such an architect-designed residence on Shiraishijima was a further recent tribute to the rigid distinction between inside and outside that gave form to Japanese society. The local prefecture government had built this hostel as a friendly gesture to encourage gaijin – outside people – visitors. Though such a gesture might seem the opposite of exclusion, it reinforced the distinction in reverse. The prices were especially low, and Japanese people could not stay in the hostel unless accompanying foreigners. Sakai, my sponsor, always on the look-out for a bargain, had told me about them, and one time years back he’d arranged a trip to Ushimado – a fishing port on the Honshu coast of the Inland Sea, rather wishfully called the Japanese Aegean because of the clusters of islands and climate favouring the olive groves terraced up their hillsides. That stay was where the idea of visiting Shiraishijima had come from in the first place. Only this time the foreigners would make the arrangements and go under their own steam.

  Not knowing the lie of the land brought its problems, of course. We had taken the ferryboat without supplies, imagining there would be the usual convenience stores on every other corner. But once landed on the tiny island, we found no restaurants, excluding the noodle shop by the harbour, and only two other stores of any kind. There was a fishing tackle place, no earthly use to us, and shut up it seemed for the winter, while the general store revealed its limitations both on the food and, more seriously, on the drink front. Gill had never taken to cooking Japanese vegetables, and we’d both eaten enough white rice for a lifetime. Still, we could make do in a pinch. But the drink and alcohol problem was chronic. There was a bottle of gin but no tonic, and the only orange was fizzy Fanta. There was coke, but no rum. There was neither western nor Japanese wine. For me it would have to be Kirin lager and Suntory whisky. Gill bought the bottle of gin and some oranges, saying she would improvise. The only other alternative had been the large bottles and barrels of saké.

  ‘Wouldn’t touch the stuff, hot or cold,’ said Gill. ‘
Wouldn’t touch the oily stuff.’

  What were we doing here? Not for the first time, I was asking myself that question. Everyone has a reason for coming to Japan – that’s what we used to say. Everyone’s escaping from something. There were those for whom it was a flight into an idealized world. They talked as if the place were all Noh plays and pottery villages, geishas and Zen Buddhist temples, that Japan had retained its authenticity. For them the whole of Japan was a pure invention. They were living in a non-existent country. But we’d come from a non-existent country too.

  Just after landing on the island, while Gill was off getting the key, I was waiting by the tiny ferry dock, a cargo coaster now anchored in its bay. A stooped and bald old man was standing, smoking, near me.

  ‘Amerika-jin, desu ka?’ he asked between drags.

  ‘Igirisu-jin,’ I replied.

  ‘English gentleman,’ he said, in a near unintelligible pronunciation.

  ‘Arigatō,’ I thanked him.

  ‘I am eighty-eight years old,’ he told me in Japanese.

  ‘Ah sō, desu ka?’ I said.

  ‘Nihongo wa jōzu desu ne!’ he exclaimed.

  My Japanese was perfect. Naturally enough I’d received this compliment before, one only ever given to foreigners who were by no means fluent. The black-hulled coaster with stern bridge and empty holds was turning slightly on its moorings beyond the harbour light. I thanked him again.

  ‘English, gentlemen, Americans, no,’ he said. ‘We Japanese and English the same.’

  ‘Sō desu ne,’ I agreed.

  Now he was pointing at the sky above the hillock rising behind that moored coaster. It was a clear blue winter’s day, a freezing wind blowing, bracingly cold.

  ‘I am too old for the war,’ he said. ‘I stay here in the war, see American planes in the sky.’

  ‘Wakarimashita,’ I said. ‘I understand.’

  ‘Many many planes,’ he said, ‘cities all burned.’