by Francis King
At the back of the church we heard a scuffling sound as two youthful policemen lurched in, straining under the weight of a coffin of plain unvarnished wood. Furukawa directed them up the aisle, while Nishimura made abortive efforts to help with the carrying—he kept catching at a corner but invariably it slipped from his grasp. Eventually the coffin was placed on the dusty wooden floor beside us, so near that I, being placed on the outside, could have touched it with my hand. Furukawa, Nishimura and the two policemen then retreated to the back of the church, where they remained standing throughout the service. Conducted entirely in Japanese, it seemed to be interminable, and I wondered whether perhaps the Finnish Lutherans used a form of service longer than that used by Lutherans elsewhere. Bibi sat immobile, her large capable hands crossed in her lap and her head slightly lowered so that a strand of hair, so blonde that it was almost white, fell across her cheek; but Bill and I could not stop fidgeting. The corrugated iron above us must have retained the heat of the day and I felt my clothes clinging to me like bandages, while every so often a bead of sweat would trickle down my nose and then make its way on to my lips, leaving a brackish taste there before I could brush it away. Bill kept shifting from one position to another, and as he did so the pew in which we were seated would creak as though the unseasoned wood were about to split. There was a curious smell of fish in the air, and I found myself speculating whether this was from our meal, from somewhere in the church, from the sea outside or—horrible thought—from the coffin beside me. I began to feel a growing nausea.
When at last the pastor had come to an end, he walked slowly down to us, to bow as I have seen Japanese professors bow at the conclusion of a lecture. It seemed as if he were awaiting our congratulations. I began to mumble some words of thanks, and as I did so he himself in turn started to thank us. Furukawa and Nishimura joined in.
Outside it was dark. The church was on a slope, with paddy-fields in front, falling away in terraces towards the sea, no more than a vague pearly wash under the red rim of the horizon. A goat bleated from beside the small house, a wooden box like a magnified rabbit-hutch, in which I presumed that the pastor lived. Behind us the two policemen had again shouldered the coffin and were coaxing it through the narrow door, with Nishimura once more making vague efforts to help them.
Behind the hill surmounted by the church there was another larger hill, a grey hump under the moonless sky. Furukawa pointed up to it. ‘It will be difficult to take the car,’ he said to Nishimura. ‘We must walk.’
The path was less than three foot across in many places, threading its way between irrigation ditches or round the trunks of trees. Every so often one of the gasping policemen would curse under his breath when he tripped on a stone or a root. Once the boy in front actually fell down, grazing one knee as the coffin see-sawed down on top of him. Nishimura giggled. There was no conversation.
Up and up we climbed until I, too, grew breathless and my legs began to ache. The day seemed to have been endless, this journey merging into our journey, of the day before from the summer-school so that it was difficult to separate the details of the one from the other. Bibi strode ahead: she alone was entirely sure-footed and she alone was not out of breath even when we reached the top.
There was a plateau, entirely bare of grass, bush or house, with a goal for football at either end and a single bench from which the cross-planks had been ripped away. The other side of it, behind a clump of trees and in a curiously secret little hollow, was a square concrete building with a chimney like a factory. This was the crematorium. Outside was a temple, like a dilapidated summer-house, and beyond—one could just make it out in the shadow of the huge beech tree under which it had been placed—there was a vermilion Shinto shrine, no bigger than a chest-of-drawers. The policemen lowered the coffin on to the porch of the crematorium and drew, one from around his neck and the other from a pocket, the strips of towelling which Japanese so often carry with them in the hot weather. They began to wipe their faces and hands, murmuring to each other. Meanwhile Furukawa went over to the temple, followed by Nishimura, and entered it, stooping at the low door and giving a nervous cough, as though to announce his presence to someone within. The pastor wandered in the same direction and then stood immobile outside, a hand on his hip, smiling at me, to reveal the single glinting tooth, whenever he caught my eye. Furukawa came out of the temple and said something. The pastor nodded and went over to the coffin. He began to murmur in Japanese, his chin sunk on his chest and his small, girlish hands clasped before him. I found myself standing in the same kind of attitude, to look surreptitiously under my lids to see what Bibi was doing. She had seated herself on a low branch of the beech tree, swinging her legs back and forth as she gazed up into the sky. Bill was beside me.
At last the pastor finished with the sign of the cross. He turned to Furukawa: ‘Finished.’
‘He has finished,’ Furukawa said to Nishimura.
Nishimura told us.
‘And now?’ I said.
But already the three Japanese were making their way down the hill, while the two policemen, at a word from Furukawa, carried the coffin into the dimly-lit interior of the building.
‘Will they cremate her now?’ I asked Nishimura, who was close beside me, grinning at me as though in reassurance through the gloom.
‘Perhaps.’
‘Well, ask Furukawa-san.’
Nishimura returned: ‘ He says that they will burn Miss Lee early tomorrow morning. They will give you the ashes later in the day. He says that it is too late to burn her now, but they will burn her very early tomorrow, maybe five or six o’clock.’
‘Poor thing.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Nothing.’
Bill slipped his arm into mine. ‘ Well, the worst is over,’ he whispered. ‘What a day!’
5
‘I expect that you’re ready for bed,’ Bibi said. We were now all of us standing outside the inn. Although it was only just after ten the crooked street was deserted and few lights could be seen in the windows on either side of it.
Furukawa told us that he would call for us the next morning at half-past nine to take us to examine Thelma’s possessions; he had already had an inventory made of them.
‘After that you’ll stay to lunch, won’t you?’ Bibi said.
I looked at Bill.
‘It’s glorious where we are,’ she went on. ‘The next bay. There’s hardly a house in sight. And I’ll try to make up to you for that awful meal this evening.’
Although I knew that Furukawa could not understand what she was saying, I nonetheless felt embarrassed.
‘That would be very nice,’ Bill said. ‘Thank you.…’ He cleared his throat. ‘I suppose that I’d better have a word with—with your brother.’
‘My brother.’
‘Hm. As he was the only other person who witnessed the accident.’
‘Well, I suppose that can be arranged,’ she replied as though reluctant to arrange it. ‘He’s awfully upset about it all.’
‘Just for the record. I shall have to make a report to the Consulate. And either I or the Consul will have to write a letter to the poor woman’s father. I don’t relish that.’ Fanatically truthful, Bill would, I knew, find it difficult to produce the consoling ambiguities required in a letter written in such circumstances.
Bibi’s last words to us that night were ‘Well, sleep well!’ Then she gave a small shudder. ‘I don’t think that I shall sleep well somehow.’
6
‘Curious,’ Bill said as we undressed. ‘I don’t know why we had to sweat all the way up that hill. There was a perfectly good road on the other side of it.’
‘Was there?’
‘Yes, didn’t you notice? I though it odd to have a crematorium with no access except by a path. I wonder why Furukawa wanted us to walk.’
‘Perhaps he thought that kind of cortege would dignify the occasion.’
‘Or maybe at that hour of the night he couldn’t get a
ny suitable transport and was ashamed to admit it.’
‘Or do you suppose that he didn’t want anyone in the town to know what was going on?’
It was one of those small Japanese mysteries which, we both knew, would never be solved. If it had been two years ago, soon after my arrival in Japan, I should have questioned Furukawa the following morning; but experience had by now taught me that if I did so, I should only embarrass him and learn nothing at all. Possibly he would give me an answer; but it would certainly not be the right one.
Bill fell asleep almost at once; but as I lay there, a breeze off the sea coming through the wire-mesh which covered the windows, I suddenly began to shiver uncontrollably, my teeth chattering and an icy sweat trickling off my body. At the time I thought that I must have a fever; but later I decided that I had been suffering delayed shock.
Chapter Three
I
Promptly at nine-thirty Nishimura came into our room to announce that Furukawa was waiting for us in the downstairs lobby.
‘Did you sleep well, Nishimura?’
‘Oh, yes, thank you, Mrs Warner.’ But the boy looked pale and strained.
Bill yawned and stretched. ‘ It’s ages since I’ve slept like that I must have been dog-tired.’
The house, we later learned, had been built for the Akulovs by a Japanese pupil of Corbusier. An oblong of roughcast concrete, it consisted of two wings, one larger than the other, connected by a pool, seething with water-lilies and grossly fat carp, around which the staircase was cantilevered. The interior, all beiges and chocolate browns and olive-greens, with huge non-representational pictures by Japanese artists on the walls (‘I’ve often wondered how they earn a living, now I know’, was Bill’s comment) was full of Scandinavian-type furniture which, we later learned, had just started to be manufactured at a factory in Yokohama owned by the Akulovs themselves. But a Japanese influence could be detected in the vestigial tokonoma of Japanese cypress in the sitting-room, containing a vast flower-arrangement in a Shiga-ware pot decorated with olive and white stripes, in the tatami in the bedrooms (we had been asked to remove our shoes) and in the sliding-doors which made it possible to throw the sitting-room, dining-room and study into one. The whole house was air-conditioned.
‘It’s gorgeous,’ I said.
‘Yes, it looks gorgeous,’ Bibi agreed. ‘It’s always being photographed for the architectural magazines. In fact, one of our guests here now is an American photographer. But nothing works. In the rainy season we’re swamped, in the winter the under-floor heating gives out. The sliding-doors, which are supposed to move by electricity, often can’t be budged even when one pushes them. As for the drainage.… No, we were foolish not to have a Japanese-style house of the traditional kind. They know how to build that sort of house, they make no mistakes, and it lasts for a century without any trouble at all.’
‘This tokonoma is very strange,’ Nishimura said. ‘And why do you keep a temple table in it?’
‘Because I like the temple table,’ Bibi replied. ‘And because it’s more than four hundred years old. Yes, the tokonoma is odd. But I happen to prefer it to an ordinary tokonoma.’
Nishimura, frowning in bewilderment, pursued obstinately: ‘But dimensions of all tokonoma are fixed. There are different kinds of tokonoma but I have never seen such tokonoma as this one.’
‘I daresay not,’ Bibi retorted, turning to me and raising her eyebrows in exasperation. ‘Well, I suppose that you’d better go to Thelma’s room. Everything there is as she left it, and Furukawa-san has put a guard on the door. It was a nuisance, having that room shut off, because otherwise we could have put up this American photographer in greater comfort. He arrived unexpectedly. The guard slept on a futon outside the door of Thelma’s room. I’ve been wondering whether to report him to Furukawa-san—the maids complained that he was cheeky to them. He’s a young and rather handsome boy.
We all of us trooped downstairs again to make our way into the larger of the two wings, the ground, floor of which was taken up by three guest-rooms corresponding to the sitting-room, dinning-room and study above. The room which Thelma had occupied was the last of the three.
As we walked down the passage towards it, I heard an American man’s voice from inside the first: ‘… You look awful in that, just awful.’
A male Japanese voice replied sulkily ‘I don’t care. I dress as I please.’
Bibi put out a hand and jerked the sliding-door across, cutting off the rest of the conversation.
The policeman of whom Bibi had spoken jumped to his feet from the chair on which he had been seated and raised his arm in a salute. Furukawa spoke to him with that laconic harshness which superiors reserve for inferiors in Japan, and the boy then produced a key and unlocked the door, fumbling nervously to do so. Furukawa ushered in Bill and myself, saying to Bibi in Japanese: ‘Excuse us please. Just a moment. Excuse us.’ Nishimura was also excluded; but after a moment, realising this, Furukawa slid the door open again and called his name. He then drew a list, made out in Japanese, from his pocket and handed it to Bill.
The room had the same odour which I remembered now that Thelma had left behind in the room of the seaside inn: a compound of expensive scent and a less easily definable musky smell of a kind which certain women exude from their persons. I had not thought of it as disagreeable on that first occasion; but now there seemed to be something cloying about it, as there is about the air-fresheners sprayed around lavatories to mask smells cruder but less nauseating. Bill must have felt the same as I, since he at once went across to the huge sliding window which made a whole outside wall to the room and began to struggle to jerk it open.
‘I shouldn’t do that,’ I warned. ‘The room is air-conditioned.’
But he went on tugging at the window until, with Nishimura to assist him, he was able to shift it.
‘That’s better.’
The sea air blew over us, salt, bitter and clammy, obliterating Thelma’s smell as the sea itself had obliterated her life.
The clothes, bearing their expensive London, Paris and Rome labels, hung in a closet that ran the length of another wall, with her shoes, extremely narrow and mostly from Ferragamo, set out on racks beneath them. Evidently she had succeeded in getting her luggage back from the inn in Matsue. Perhaps Bill’s money had enabled her to do so, I thought in momentary bitterness.
‘You’d better begin packing those,’ Bill said as I surveyed the closet with a mixture of envy and repugnance. ‘Nishimura will help you. Meantime I’ll go through these papers.’
I began to pack with far more care than I should ever have given to my own belongings: lining the dresses with the tissue-paper I found stuffed into the four fibre-glass suitcases, placing the shoes in their bags, and even brushing some of the clothes. The accumulation of soiled linen crammed into a drawer revolted me—surely in Japan, where laundry is cheap, and above all in a house as luxurious as this, there could be no excuse for not having it washed?
I had been surprised, when we had entered, to find the room so tidy; but now, as I came across old receipts or letters in the folds of dresses, used Kleenex tissues in pockets, dirty handkerchiefs and stockings and knickers all in a jumble under a pile of shoes, I realised that this impression had been only a superficial one, paralleling that similar external order which masked the interior chaos of Thelma’s whole life.
Furukawa-san had placed himself on the bed, and after a while Nishimura, finding that I was no longer calling on him to help me—since Japanese usually travel with no more than the possessions they can tie up in a handkerchief, they are hopeless as, packers—slumped down to join him there. The young policeman remained standing at the door, his beautiful but bovine face, the cheek-bones glinting and the long eyelashes marvellously lustrous in the sunlight from the now open window, set in a placid blankness, except when he succeeded in catching my eye, to give me a furtive half-smile. I had to remind myself that since he had already been ‘cheeky’ to the maids, his attentio
n was really not all that flattering.
Bill was reading some letters at the desk, having unzipped the flat crocodile writing-case which he had found there. His face looked vaguely troubled, the lips drawn in and the eyes more protuberant than usual. Silently he handed me a sheet of blue writing paper, headed ‘Oriental Hotel, Kobe’, with a line in green ink drawn thickly through that and the address superimposed C/o Akulov, Villa Malcontenta, 11 Sanjobocho, Abekawa, Shimaneken. Villa Malcontenta! I suppose that it was no more absurd than the houses on the hills above Kobe to which members of the foreign business community have given names like ‘Nantucket’, ‘Sans Souci’, or ‘Seaview’; but it made me smile.
I began to read, aware that not merely the young policeman but also Furukawa and Nishimura were now watching me:
‘Dearest Dad,
As you will see from the above I have moved from Kobe. I gave up my job there because the weather was really awful and the family with which I worked were not at all nice. But, don’t worry about me, because I have found a much nicer place in this really gorgeous house with every mod.con., a bathroom all to myself and marvellous food. I’m a kind of secretary companion but I really don’t have to do anything much except be amusing! This family is one of the richest in Japan, they’re Russians but they left Russia before the communists took over and now they’ve made their home here and they have all kinds of business interests. Very interesting people and so generous and kind. I think that I’ll stay with them for some time, though I know that you’re worried that I’ve remained so long abroad. I’ll try to write more regularly anyway, I promise that. It’s not that I don’t often think of you and Doreen, I do, but you know how it is, I was never much of a correspondent and when one is busy time just flies. I do feel awful about your birthday and now I can’t think what to buy you here that you would like. Maybe I’d better just keep the money and then on my way home I’ll buy you something really nice in Hong Kong where the shopping is fabulous.