One Morning Like a Bird

by Andrew Miller

  From between his fingers the long-since-extinguished cigarette tumbles to the mat. He whispers something, some unintelligible protest, then at last falls silent, his weight pressing more and more heavily against Yuji’s shoulder. After a minute the door slides open. The women come in. They have the bedding with them and swiftly, speechlessly, as though it has now a familiar routine, they lift the sleeping man and lie him in it. The old woman starts to undress him. Yuji follows Kyoko out of the room. She comes with him as far as the street gate. ‘He’s ill,’ she says in a whisper. ‘The wound keeps opening. Those things . . . Please, pay no attention.’

  ‘You’ve heard them?’

  ‘He’s ill,’ she says. ‘And when he drinks . . .’

  ‘You think they’re not true?’

  ‘True?’

  ‘The stories?’

  She shakes her head. ‘I have to go in,’ she says. ‘I have to go in now.’

  ‘You’ll be needing this,’ he says, taking the crutch from where Otaki has left it propped against the gate. He hands it to her as tenderly as he can, as though it was a spray of plum blossom. She thanks him, clutches it across her breasts, and scurries inside.

  14

  ‘What did he want?’ asks Father, coming from his room and stopping Yuji at the top of the stairs the following morning.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Yuji. ‘He was drunk.’

  ‘I see,’ says Father, ‘Hmm.’

  Yuji waits. Is that it? Can he go? He does not want to repeat what he has heard, to say (standing in the morning shadows at the top of the stairs) that their neighbour is an expert in decapitation, or that Japanese doctors in China behave like the criminally insane. Whatever Kyoko might wish to think he is sure the stories are true. Saburo hasn’t the imagination to invent such things.

  ‘He’s brought it back with him,’ says Father.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The war.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I pity him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I never liked him, but even so.’

  ‘Yes, even so.’

  ‘To lose both parents while still a child. A hard beginning.’

  ‘When you were in the army, Father . . .’

  ‘It was 1913. There was no war.’

  ‘I know. But what did you do?’

  ‘Tried not to die of boredom.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘Studied when I could. Played a lot of shogi.’

  ‘It wasn’t so bad, then?’

  ‘Stay on the right side of Kushida, Yuji. I’ll do what I can.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Ishihara’s group. Can they help you? I imagine they have better connections than I do. Now, at least.’

  ‘You would approve of me accepting their help?’

  Father starts down the stairs. ‘I might,’ he says over his shoulder, ‘prefer it to having you howl in the street at night. Your mother certainly would.’

  15

  The money from Hideo Makiyama has dwindled to a handful of small change. The screenplay, which one day might bring him a hundred yen or more, is just a single sheet of paper with a single unfilmable scene about a boy flying to the heart of the sun. The last handout from Grandfather went on new boots for the coming winter. As for the banknotes Uncle Kensuke pressed into his hand at the station, he cannot account for them at all. Books? Beer?

  It is time to see old Horikawa again, to sit at the window, look at trains and drink coffee. After his efforts to write ‘something exalted, something delirious’ he should have no difficulty scratching a few lines in praise of shipping companies or toothpaste. He sets off for Hibaya, cool early October sunshine on the back of his neck, but when he reaches the building and walks up the broken wax tiling of the stairs, the office door is shut and locked. There is no sign on it, no ‘Back in an hour’ or ‘Closed for reasons of ill health’. He goes down to the repair shop, calls a greeting, steps inside. The shop is a nest, a densely packed hive of bicycles – new, old, wheels on, wheels off. They even hang from the ceiling, clusters of them suspended from hooks. He calls again, gets no reply. The concrete floor is dotted with flowers of oil. Behind a curtain at the back of the shop, an infant is wailing, methodically. He goes back upstairs, writes a note on a scrap of paper and slips it under the door, then, with nothing better to do, he eats under the railway line, an elbow-to-elbow place where every time a train rumbles overhead the surface of his broth breaks into delicate ripples.

  After eating (and it’s true what Kushida said, his appetite is better these days, he is healthier, so much so he has once or twice seriously considered taking up smoking), he walks to the park and squats on a grass bank beneath a maple tree to read the paper. The delegation who signed the pact in Berlin have arrived home. Prince Konoe and senior members of the government have expressed their gratitude. The Fifth Division has entered Hanoi. The people there have welcomed them as elder brothers, though in the photographs the people are just shapes in the margin, out of focus. The back page of the paper shows a woman modelling the new monpe trousers at the Matsuya department store. The trousers are a synthesis of fashion and the national will. They are elegant, perfectly modest, but leave the legs free for the physical labour all sections of society must now be prepared to take part in . . .

  He folds the paper, discards it at the first bench he passes, and returns to the building. The office is still locked, and now, downstairs, the steel grille of the repair shop is shut and chained. Is there some local holiday? A neighbourhood kami of good profits, a Buddha of low taxes to be venerated? He looks at his watch. Almost half past three. On Tuesday afternoons the Montparnasse in Asakusa shows half-price double-bills of British, French or American films. If he can get there in time, then the day will not have been wasted. He scribbles another note to Horikawa, hurries to the stop opposite the Imperial Theatre, takes a cross-town bus to the Kannon Temple, then jogs the 500 yards to the cinema.

  ‘Make the most of it,’ says Mr Suzuki, the manager of the Montparnasse, sitting in his white suit in the ticket booth. ‘From now on I’m just showing jidaigeki pictures. Noble warriors, women with no eyebrows, lovely costumes . . .’

  ‘Haven’t you said that before?’ asks Yuji, wheezing from his run, and looking past the manager’s head at the posters for Stagecoach and Pépé le Moko.

  ‘I mean it,’ says the manager, snipping Yuji’s ticket from the roll. ‘This foreign stuff will get me shut down. Or worse. The next time you see me I’ll have a samourai topknot. You’ll think I’m one of the Forty-seven Ronin.’

  In the little auditorium thirty, perhaps forty customers are waiting on seats of frayed green plush. A few couples, but mostly men on their own, amateurs of cinema – some in uniform – who find at the Montparnasse what the sushi tsu find at Kawashima’s. Yuji takes a seat at the end of a row halfway back. There is a short wait while Suzuki moves from the ticket booth to the projection room (they can hear his footsteps, his weary tread on the stairs), then the newsreel begins – trumpets, eagles, a spinning globe. They stand for the Emperor, sit again, polish glasses, light cigarettes, and bend towards the screen, lean like divers at the edge of a glittering pool.

  Three hours later, sated, they file outside, blinking in the blue and gold of early evening. Yuji loiters at the kerb, his atoms dispersed between the deserts of New Mexico and the labyrinth of the Kasbah. He is staring, with vacant intensity, at a board outside the confectionary shop on the other side of the narrow street. There is a painting on the board of the seasonal delicacy ‘autumn comes to the treetops’, and he is wondering what Ringo Kid – a man who gallops through treeless landscapes – might make of such a delicacy (would he buy some for a sweetheart?), when a customer, a woman, a slight figure in a blue and white kimono, comes out of the shop and stops directly opposite him.

  ‘Mr Takano?’

  ‘Mrs Yamaguchi!’

  ‘What a surprise to see you here.’

  Students on bicycles glide b
etween them, then two taxis full of young geishas, shamisen cases on their laps. He crosses the street. She waits for him, neat as a doll, in her hands a box of sweets wrapped in paper decorated with autumn flowers – dahlias, amaranths.

  ‘I was at the cinema,’ says Yuji.

  ‘The Montparnasse?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What a nice way to spend the afternoon. What did you see?’

  He tells her (‘Gabin is a favourite of mine,’ she says), and then, to defend himself against the charge no one has made, the accusation that he is the sort of young man who spends the day in cinemas instead of taking part in the physical labour even fashionable woman are preparing for, he gives an absurdly detailed reprise of his day – the failed search for Horikawa, his inability to find even the mechanic who would surely have been able to tell him where Horikawa was – an account she listens to intently and with just the faintest smile on her lips.

  ‘And the dance school?’ he asks, blushing and scowling at the paving stone between their feet.

  She thanks him for his kind enquiry. It is not, she explains, a time favourable to an enterprise such as hers, but she has been able to keep a few of her older students, the professionals mostly. The others, one by one, have dropped away. She was particularly sorry not to have Mademoiselle Feneon any more.

  ‘Alissa?’

  ‘We have not seen her since the rainy season, though she wrote a most polite letter. I hope her ill health is no longer troubling her?’

  ‘She’s away,’ says Yuji, quickly.

  ‘In the country, perhaps?’

  ‘Yes. In the country.’

  ‘For a foreigner she danced very well.’

  ‘She did?’

  ‘Oh, yes. You should have seen her dancing “Snow”. Really, a quite unexpected poise.’

  ‘I have heard her play the piano. When she plays Chopin, it’s as good as the radio.’

  Mrs Yamaguchi nods, amused again. ‘I hope you find your business acquaintance,’ she says.

  ‘My . . . ?’

  ‘The man you were looking for?’

  ‘Oh . . . yes. Thank you.’

  She bows and moves away, pigeon-toed, her dancer’s back straight as a board above the immaculately tied obi. Then she turns – sinks it seems – into one of the alleys that wind like waterless streams down towards the river.

  A polite letter? Ill health? What else did the letter say? And if Alissa was ill, why had Feneon not spoken of it? What sort of illness? A serious one?

  He recrosses the street. Outside the Montparnasse a small queue is forming for the evening showing. Suzuki is in his booth again, scissors and tickets at the ready. And something – the white of his suit, perhaps – brings unbidden to Yuji’s mind the Hitomaro lines Alissa recited in the moonlit study: ‘One morning like a bird she was gone in the white scarves of death.’

  And then? Something about a child, who cries for her, who she left behind . . .

  He looks towards the alley where Mrs Yamaguchi disappeared. If he ran, he might catch up with her, stop her, question her. What she doesn’t know she will be able to guess, a woman like her. Who else can he ask now that Feneon’s house is forbidden to him? He bites his lip, stares as though staring would bring her back, draw her to him. Then he looks down, walks to the wall beside the cinema, and quietly takes his place at the end of the queue.

  PART 3

  Yuji in the Year of the Snake

  I go out of the darkness

  Onto a road of darkness

  Lit only by the far-off

  Moon on the edge of the mountains.

  Izumi

  1

  Meetings of the local neighbourhood association are held in Otaki’s noodle bar, a familiar space – gloomy, savoury, endearingly scuffed – where nobody’s intimate domestic life need be exposed to the curiosity of his neighbours. There has not been a meeting since the irises were in flower. Then – at the firm request of the Home Ministry – associations from Okinawa to Hokkaido, gathered to discuss how they might contribute more to the national struggle, what they might cut back on, what they could do without, how, in this particular hour of destiny, they might, somehow, be better neighbours to each other.

  This evening’s meeting, twilight, the second week of November, is also at the exhortation of the ministry. A new guide has been issued, a booklet with the imperial standard on the cover, and inside, in numbered paragraphs, a list of the duties all loyal subjects must be ready to perform. Through the neighbourhood associations (the national defence women’s groups, the Great Japan youth associations, the patriotic workers committees), every man and woman in the home islands will be welded into a single disciplined force. Everyone will have his place. Everyone will wait on the Emperor’s word, ready, should the order come, for the ‘smashing of the jewels’ – the final sacrificial battle. There’s a new slogan, the winning entry in a competition run by the Asahi newspaper. ‘Abolish desire until victory!’ Associations could, if they wished, shout this heartily at the conclusion of their meetings. Such behaviour, the booklet suggested, was in the interests of everyone.

  Yuji, who has been delivering cigarettes to a beer hall in Shibuya with Mr Fujitomi and the blue Nissan, is the last to arrive. He nods his apologies to his neighbours, takes his place beside Father.

  ‘You saw him today?’ whispers Father.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Sonoko says his appetite is improving.’

  ‘And his movement?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  The men are ranged around a long low table at the back of the restaurant. Otaki, Itaki, Ozono, old Mr Kawabata, Mr Kiyama the wedding photographer, Father, Yuji. Saburo is at the top of the table, his crutch angled against the wall behind him. He is, apparently, in full uniform. He has a medal on his chest, the Wound Medal (Second Class). Of the others, three of them – Itaki, Otaki and Mr Kiyama – are in civil defence jackets. Behind the curtain, in the kitchen, Otaki’s wife and sister are preparing refreshments for the end of the meeting. The only other woman present, kneeling in the obscurity by the door, is Grandma Kitamura.

  ‘I suppose,’ says Otaki, clearing his throat, ‘we should make a start?’ He glances at Father, the disgraced but still august professor of law, a man to whom the procedures of meetings must be almost second nature, but Father keeps his gaze on the tabletop.

  ‘It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?’ says Otaki, and laughs with embarrassment.

  Yuji looks over at Saburo. Saburo is staring at him. Yuji looks away.

  ‘It seems,’ continues Otaki, doubtfully, ‘we have to make some decisions?’

  ‘An auspicious day for it,’ says the wedding photographer.

  ‘Indeed,’ says Itaki, reverently inclining his head. ‘The two-thousand-six-hundredth anniversary of the Empire!’

  ‘Have you seen the pavilion outside the palace?’ asks the photographer.

  Yuji has seen it through the window of the Nissan. An immense and lavishly decorated tent, the centrepiece of the week’s celebrations, radiant in the November sunshine. Crowds of police, crowds of soldiers . . .

  ‘All the big ones will be there,’ says the photographer. ‘Prince Konoe, General Tojo, Admiral Nagano . . .’

  ‘Imagine the food,’ says Itaki, sighing. ‘Though they say the Empress will never open her mouth in public.’

  ‘I’ve heard that myself,’ says the photographer. ‘The thought of such modesty moved me greatly.’ He straightens his back. His face takes on an expression of awed contemplation.

  After a respectful interval (briefly disturbed by Mr Kawabata excusing himself and tottering away towards the toilet), Otaki holds up the ministry booklet. ‘There’s quite a lot in it,’ he says. ‘I was quite surprised.’

  ‘The most important thing,’ says Itaki, whose civil defence jacket is obviously home-dyed, and recently too, for some of the dye, a curious dun colour, has rubbed off on his wrists, ‘is to elect a block captain. No?’