‘Yuji!’
Father is calling him in. Father is scowling magnificently. Yuji, clutching his gifts, crosses the street towards him.
9
In the little cemetery at Kotobuki the men are cleaning Grandmother Takano’s grave. When they finish, they cross a path to Ryuichi’s grave and start again, wiping and scraping away another year of lichen, of the city’s soft fall of soot from the stacks across the river. Kensuke’s daughter, Asako, sits with her child, three-year-old Akiko, in the shade of a gingko tree, and answers, as simply as she can, the little girl’s questions about the world of the dead, the duties of the living. All across the cemetery, across the whole city, the smoke of incense uncoils in the shimmering heat of midday. The men step back, mop their faces. Their brows are shining. They stand in silence until the child, running from the shade, clutches Kensuke’s hand and tugs it as though suddenly afraid for him. He lifts her up, sits her in his arms. Grandfather takes out his pocket watch. The lid flashes in the sunlight as he opens it. ‘The taxis will be waiting,’ he says. ‘I don’t like to make them wait in this heat.’
They go to a restaurant in the Hamacho quarter, owned by a Mr Kono, the adopted son of one of Grandfather’s old employees. Kono has kept the best table for them, in a private room that overlooks a small garden where the blooms of the pomegranates are so vivid they almost burn the eye. The meal begins with chilled bean curd. Later there are salads, persimmon leaf sushi, eel hamo-style. Yuji is kneeling beside Asako. When, yesterday, she arrived at the house with her father and daughter (Sawa, at the last minute, had decided her back was too painful for such a journey), she was wearing a skirt and blouse, but today, for the Festival of Lanterns, the Festival of the Dead, she is dressed more formally in a cream kimono with a pattern of tangling ivy. To Yuji, who has not seen her since her wedding in Showa 10, she appears to have lost all trace of the old mountain-child boisterousness that once so impressed him. Each speaks evasively about the present, the recent past, and starts to smile only when they reminisce about the long-ago summer at the farm – the waterfall, the berry-picking, the ill-tempered cockerel that pecked at Yuji’s heels until she chased it off with clods of earth. As they talk, the little girl, shy, almost voiceless in this unfamiliar company, prods suspiciously at her food and every few seconds glances up intently at the side of her mother’s face.
Across the table, Uncle Kensuke is showing Grandfather a photograph. Yuji has already seen it – Hiroshi stiff and gaunt in the uniform of a newly graduated pilot of the First Air Fleet.
‘He should be with us today,’ says Grandfather. ‘He should be here.’
‘He would have liked to,’ says Uncle Kensuke, ‘but it seems that their training is intensifying.’
‘The same goes for your husband,’ says Grandfather, looking over the table at Asako. ‘You would think Mitsubishi could spare him for a day or two.’
‘Minoru,’ says Uncle Kensuke, ‘is helping to build the planes Hiroshi will be flying. Skilled technicians are in short supply.’
‘Like everything else,’ says Grandfather. ‘Well, at least they let my great-granddaughter come, eh? I must be grateful for that, I suppose.’
As the meal ends, Kono persuades them to take some little glasses of cognac. He joins them, and sits with Grandfather while the old man tells him tales about the city in the days of the first China war of ’94, stories that falter into song, into sighing nasal elegies for the tea houses of the Yanagibashi, the night cherries of the Yoshiwara . . . Father and Uncle Kensuke move to the open screens, light cigarettes and peer out at the lengthening shadows of the garden. Yuji, his back to them as he shows the child for the fifth time, the sixth, the seventh, the only magic trick he knows (a ten-sen coin that ‘sinks’ through the skin of his hand to reappear behind one or other of her ears), listens to Uncle Kensuke talking, quietly and earnestly, about Father and Mother coming to the mountains.
‘We’ve more than enough room since the children left. We grow much of what we eat, kill the occasional hen. And Noriko can be as quiet there as she is here. With all that has happenened it can hardly be comfortable for you staying in Tokyo. As for the future . . .’
‘Things are not as bad as all that.’
‘Really? That’s not been my impression.’
‘And what about Father?’
‘I’d ask him too if I thought there was the slightest hope of his coming. At least out in Setagaya he’s practically in the countryside. Things should be safer there.’
‘Safer?’
‘If there’s bombing.’
‘Bombing!
‘Look in the papers. The Germans are raiding English cities every day.’
‘The comparison is a little misleading, isn’t it? Where would these bombers come from? Chungking? Moscow?’
‘You should talk to Hiroshi. He has told me things I do not dare to tell Sawa. She has trouble enough sleeping as it is.’
‘I can’t see Noriko making such an upheaval. You saw her this morning.’
‘Better to make such a move now while there is still some normality.’
‘I appreciate your generosity.’
‘So you’ll consider it?’
‘There’s the question of Yuji.’
‘He, of course, is welcome too, but his situation . . . I doubt even your friend Kushida can keep him out of the army for good . . .’
Two butterflies, black as charred paper, blow into the room, flutter clumsily over the end of the table, then find their way back into the garden again.
‘On a day like today,’ says Father, ‘the situation doesn’t seem so serious. I don’t want to act rashly.’
‘I understand that,’ says Uncle Kensuke, ‘but if you don’t act at all . . .’
For the three days before the visitors make their return journey, the child, with her small, determined face, follows Yuji around the house as though connected to him by a length of wire. When he slips away from her, she calls for him, hunts him down. He tells her, in an exasperated voice, that he is trying to write a film about the end of the world. She frowns, then squats on the mat in front of him and begins to wail. He gives in, takes the records out of the storage cupboard, lifts the gramophone from its long sleep beside the corner bookshelf in the Western room, and plays ragtime and jazz until the needles are blunt. He folds her birds out of paper, catches cicadas for her and shows her how, from her cupped hands, to free their clumsy bodies into the air again.
‘She’ll miss you,’ says Uncle Kensuke, sitting down on the verandah beside Yuji, the last morning of the visit. In the garden, the girl, a straw hat tied under her chin, is chasing dragonflies, now and then pausing to be sure that Yuji is watching her.
‘It must be the trick I showed her in the restaurant,’ says Yuji.
‘Who knows. Children choose the people they want.’
‘I thought I might remind her of Minoru.’
‘It’s possible. Though you could hardly be more unlike him.’
‘Is the taxi on its way?’
‘Another half-hour.’
‘I hope Auntie Sawa will be feeling better,’ says Yuji.
‘Yes. Let’s hope so.’
‘And please give my regards to Hiroshi.’
‘When we see him. They don’t give him much leave, and these days he often prefers something more exciting than a farm in the mountains and the company of two old people. You might see him in Tokyo one day.’
‘Yes. If I’m here.’
‘You want to go somewhere?’
‘I’m not sure what I want. But probably it won’t have anything to do with what I want.’
‘You mean, if you get your papers?’
‘Isn’t it inevitable?’
‘Tell me, are you writing these days?’
‘Some journalism.’ He shrugs. ‘I wouldn’t necessarily call it writing.’
‘Your father said it was something on Ishihara. He said it was well written.’
‘I didn’t know he had s
een it.’
Uncle Kensuke smiles. ‘Apparently you left the magazine open on the table one morning.’
‘And he said it was well written?’
‘He doesn’t much care for Ishihara, of course, or Young Japan, but he has always respected your ability.’
‘My ability!’
‘When Ryuichi died your father became rather cynical. Stubborn and cynical. He wasn’t always so. When he was young he was full of enthusiasms. Quite a talker, even. You should not mistake his reticence for indifference.’
‘Did he say anything else? About me?’
‘Only that he was afraid he would not be able to protect you.’
‘From whom?’
‘He was not specific.’
‘I thought it was Father who needed protecting.’
‘All of us will need some protecting before the world is much older. But what about poetry?’
‘It doesn’t seem like a time for poetry.’
‘No? I can’t think of a better one. Isn’t poetry just about paying attention to what is here? Two men, for example, sitting talking while a child runs in the garden. The quietness of that has a certain value, don’t you think, in such a clamorous age?’
‘I’m not sure many share your view, Uncle. People want other things now.’
‘You might think it’s not a time for something as trivial as dyeing cloth, but now I’m doing it more carefully than ever because indigo is my way of speaking. Which reminds me. I have something for you. It’s in the suitcase. I’d almost forgotten . . .’
They go through the house to where two tan leather cases are waiting by the edge of the vestibule step. Kneeling, Uncle unbuckles the smaller case, pulls out a pair of folded yukatas, some Tokyo newspapers, then lifts out a square of folded silk and holds it up to Yuji.
‘I remember the summer you stayed with us as a little boy you used to sit in the dyeing barn, sometimes for an hour or more, watching what I was doing. Hiroshi never had that sort of interest.’
Yuji takes the cloth, lets it fall open. It’s a square of subtly dyed silk, the indigo darkening in diagonal waves from blue-black to a blue so pale it’s like the blue of a vein on the inside of a child’s wrist.
‘It’s just a test piece, too small to be of much use, but somehow I liked the way it came out. I thought you might like it too.’
Yuji thanks him, holds the cloth up to the light that comes through the open doors of the Western room. ‘Do you also remember,’ he says, ‘how, that summer, you would often massage my chest in the evening before supper, and because the dye was on your hands it stained my skin? Even a month after I came home I could see it, though every day a little fainter.’
‘Indigo has special properties. Wrap something in indigo and you preserve it.’
‘Then,’ says Yuji, carefully folding the material, ‘I must find something precious to wrap in this.’
‘I’m sure you will,’ says Uncle Kensuke, absently, as he buckles the straps of the case.
In the garden the girl is calling Yuji’s name. A repetitive little voice, shrill as an insect. ‘Yuji! Yuji! Yujiii!’
10
The days that follow the visitors’ departure bring the first rumours of Saburo’s return. In the noodle bar, Sachiko, Otaki’s wall-eyed sister, serving him a lunch of zaru soba, tells him she has heard from a regular customer, who has a nephew who drinks with an assistant at the military clerk’s office in Ueno, that Saburo will be back before the beginning of the ninth month. The next afternoon, Mrs Itaki, wiping down the woodwork at the front of her shop, assures Yuji that her husband has been told by a soldier who saw Saburo in Dairen only two months ago that his ship, in all probability, will dock at Yokohama on 7 September. Even Miyo claims to know something, telling Yuji that their neighbour will return no earlier than the thirteenth but no later than the twentieth. Her informant is the soy-seller’s son, who heard it from his father, who heard it from the wife of an official he delivers to up in Yanaka.
The first of September – the beginning of the typhoon season, the seventeenth anniversary of the Great Earthquake – is a mournful day of sultry heat that feels neither like summer nor autumn. Yuji waits in his room and once an hour imagines he hears, rising above the cries of itinerant salesmen and the cooing of radio orchestras, the voice of his old friend, his enemy, calling to him.
On the seventh he waits again. Again on the eighth, on the ninth . . . There are no more rumours. People seem to have forgotten about Saburo. Is he coming back at all? Yuji has not seen Grandma Kitamura since the telegram (is she ill?). Kyoko, he has glimpsed several times in the garden, early mornings and dusks on those days she was not on the trains. On the last occasion he imagined he noticed a subtle alteration in her, a suggestive melancholy in the way she picked a leaf from the surface of the pond, then stood still as a horse in the shade of the plum tree . . . If a wound can get better, it can get worse too. Could the Kitamuras be waiting for a second telegram with darker, more conclusive news? Whatever the truth of it, he will listen to no more gossip from waitresses and serving girls.
On the thirteenth he cycles through a rising wind to meet Oki and Shozo at the bathhouse. As they wash at the taps, Oki says that he saw Junzo, two days after the Festival of the Dead, in a café in Jinbocho.
‘Who was he with?’
‘He was on his own.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Not much.’
‘Not much?’
‘It hardly seemed like him at all. After a few minutes I felt embarrassed and made up some appointment. In fact, I said I was meeting you.’
‘Did he ask about me?’
‘Just said I’d better go if I was meeting you.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it.’
Upstairs, after the bath, they drink beer and watch through the room’s only window the sky building with storm clouds. On the roof of the house opposite, a woman plucks streaming washing from a line, balls it in her arms, and hurries inside. ‘We’re in for a blow, all right,’ says Watanabe, swaying by the young men’s table on big splayed feet. ‘There’ll be roofs stripped by morning.’ His wife shouts up the stairs, tells him to close the rain shutters. The light goes on, feebly, under a shade of insect-speckled glass.
‘By the way,’ asks Shozo, as the young men gather by the street entrance, buttoning coats and tying mufflers, ‘is the French Club still going, or is that all over now?’
‘Over?’
‘I was just wondering. You know . . . With things as they are.’
Outside, they separate with hasty waves. Yuji, his trouser cuffs snapping at his ankles, wheels his bicycle into the teeth of the wind. The sky is turquoise, orange, bruise yellow. A warm rain begins, a swirling downpour that seems to fall from all sides at once. In less than a minute Yuji is as wet as when he sat in the baths. A man beckons to him from a doorway. Yuji shakes his head. There is not far to go, and this sudden violence – all of summer being torn to pieces – is exhilarating. He shouts out scraps of poetry: ‘Cette idole, yeux noirs et crin jaune, sans parents ni cour!’ The wind smears the words across his face, the rain dashes them away. A pot of flowers (the kind of big ceramic tub he would struggle to lift on his own) sails from a roof garden and explodes in a halo of earth and petals against the manically creaking sign of a leather-goods store. When he reaches home he’ll carry the sake bottle up to the platform and stand there, captain of a doomed ship, reciting the whole of ‘Le Bateau Ivre’ to the thrashing gingko tree. What does it matter if it’s bad for his health? With things as they are, isn’t good health more of a threat to him than sickness? Good health could be the death of him.
By the time he arrives at the end of his own street the air stinks of sea wrack and flooded drains. He pauses beside the telegraph pole outside Otaki’s to wipe the water from his face. Then shielding his eyes with his hands, he watches an umbrella of lacquered paper (some kind of dark flower painted on its top) weaving up the middle of the roa
d towards him. It’s hard at first to tell what’s going on. There seem to be three, perhaps four people beneath it, and with the wind behind them they are having to fight hard to keep the umbrella from being snatched away and flung over the singing radio aerials. What a subject for a Hiroshige print! The driving rain, the gloom, the jumbled legs, the shimmering umbrella held so low it hides their faces completely. It looks like a crab, or some strange blind cuttlefish labouring across the bottom of the ocean. He would laugh if he didn’t think the wind would scoop the air from his lungs. Could this be in the screenplay? An opening shot, comic-pathetic, an image redolent of struggle, absurdity . . .
As they come closer – now accelerating a little, now trying to anchor themselves against the force of the storm – he begins to make it out. A woman on one side, a woman the other and between them, rocking between them, a figure, a dark figure, a man, a three-legged man, a man with a crutch . . .
A crutch!
Dragging the bicycle with him, he presses himself against the pole. The umbrella comes to a halt fifteen yards away. A head appears – the old woman. She shoulders open her gate, then turns, and like some aged flunky from the court of Pu Yi, starts to shuffle backwards up the path, the umbrella gripped in both fists over the stooping man’s head. Kyoko is left behind to shut the gate. She glances into the street, looks both ways, her hair whipping about her face, but if she sees Yuji, if she picks out his ragged shadow from all this shifting, melting world, she gives no sign of it, and in another moment, hauling the gate against the wind, she is gone.
One Morning Like a Bird Page 15