One Morning Like a Bird

by Andrew Miller

  The wedding photographer nods vigorously. Yuji has heard nothing of this. A block captain? He scans his neighbours’ faces, seeing, on at least three of them, the nervous smirks of schoolboy conspirators.

  ‘When you think about,’ says Otaki, ‘it should be someone with experience.’

  ‘I agree,’ says Itaki. ‘But someone with the right experience.’ He looks at Saburo and grins.

  ‘And a cool head,’ says the photographer. ‘Wouldn’t that be important?’

  ‘Certainly,’ says Otaki, now, like the other two, casting shy glances at the lounging figure at the top of the table.

  ‘Professor Takano,’ drawls Saburo, watching the smoke of his cigarette flowing in slow blue waves from between his outstretched fingers, ‘is the most educated man here . . .’

  Father looks up. ‘Quite impossible,’ he says, addressing Otaki in a voice that invites no further discussion.

  ‘Is it a position for a younger man?’ asks Otaki, flustered.

  ‘Perhaps you are right,’ says Saburo. ‘In which case, the professor’s son would be a good candidate. Isn’t it true,’ he says, smiling at Yuji, ‘that you’re a few months younger than me?’

  ‘It’s true,’ says Yuji. ‘But I wonder if my experience is really suitable.’

  ‘The difficulty,’ answers Saburo, ‘is knowing what your experience really is.’

  The photographer giggles.

  ‘His experience,’ says Father, ‘is more varied than you might imagine. How many of us here, for example, can speak another language, fluently, as Yuji does?’

  ‘Is it Chinese?’ asks Saburo, jutting his head forwards. ‘Chinese is the language he’ll need soon.’

  Mr Kawabata returns from the toilet. ‘Hardly a drop,’ he mutters, knee joints cracking as he takes his place on the mat. ‘And yet I felt I needed it.’

  ‘But what about you?’ asks Itaki, bowing and addressing Saburo as ‘honourable soldier’.

  ‘Wouldn’t you consider it?’ adds Otaki.

  ‘We would really feel we had the right person,’ says the photographer.

  ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ asks Saburo, one finger tapping the Wound Medal.

  ‘But you move around like a cat,’ says Itaki.

  ‘Really, it’s remarkable,’ says Kiyama.

  ‘The truth,’ says Saburo, ‘is that my vote was going to be for Mr Ozono. He has made the greatest sacrifice. Shouldn’t we show our appreciation of it by offering the position to him?’

  Ozono blushes. ‘Like the professor,’ he says, ‘it would be quite awkward, at this moment, to accept such a responsibility. If I still had Kenji to help in the shop, but . . .’

  ‘You’re the perfect choice,’ says Itaki to Saburo. ‘Don’t you see?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Saburo. ‘There may be some people here who think I’m not up to it.’

  ‘Eh? Everybody has the greatest confidence in you,’ says Otaki, glancing eagerly around the table.

  ‘Everybody?’

  ‘Please,’ says Itaki. ‘You must let us insist.’

  ‘It’s embarrassing . . .’ says Saburo. He waits. Is he counting off the seconds? Then he sighs as though some great burden is being lowered onto his shoulders. ‘But if you are going to insist, what can I say except I will try to serve you and His Sacred Majesty with all my strength. Just as I did in China.’

  ‘So you’ll do it?’ asks Otaki.

  ‘Abolish victory until the final desire!’ cries Mr Kawabata, his eyes tightly shut, his cheeks trembling with emotion.

  Yuji looks over to the door. The old woman has leaned into the light so that it hangs in a yellow veil across her face. Seeing herself observed, she settles back on her haunches, steals her smile back into the shadows.

  By eight thirty, swept along by a wave of satisfaction that the matter of the appointment (this irksome new post no honest tradesman could be expected to waste his time on) has been handled with the necessary deftness, all other business – saving deposits, sanitation, liaison with community councils, comfort bags for the troops – is dealt with easily. Otaki summons his wife. She comes in with a steaming earthenware pot of fat white udon noodles. The sister brings in the sake. They drink to the anniversary of the Empire, to the health of the imperial family, to the army, to the navy, to the homeland. They tilt back their heads and sing the neighbourhood association song (‘A sharp tap, tap from the neighbourhood asso-ci-ation! When I opened the lattice gate, there was a fa-mi-liar face!’) The photographer begins a story about a young couple he photographed the previous week in Shitaya, but no one, it seems, can understand whether the story is intended to be sentimental or lewd.

  Father begins to push himself up from the mat. ‘If you will excuse me . . .’

  ‘Before we finish,’ says Saburo, ‘let me thank you again for your confidence in me.’

  ‘Not at all,’ says Otaki. ‘It’s we who must be grateful.’

  ‘I am a soldier,’ says Saburo. ‘I think like a soldier.’

  ‘That’s exactly it,’ says Itaki.

  ‘Soldiers don’t put off what needs to be done,’ continues Saburo. ‘They do it straight away.’

  ‘Like photographers!’ cries the photographer, his face blazing from the drink.

  ‘So I have made a rota . . .’

  ‘A rota?’ asks Otaki, quietly.

  ‘For fire-watching,’ says Saburo. ‘Other rotas will follow. I will post them on the gate of my house. Everyone will make it his duty to read them at least once a day. There can be no excuses.’ He pauses to put on his cap, to carefully adjust it. ‘The honour of taking the first watch I have awarded to the Takano family. It is now nine twenty. Deployment will commence at nine forty-five.’ He uses the wall to gain his footing, takes the crutch and leaves with the old woman. The door slides shut. The chimes jangle. The men keep their eyes lowered. Otaki bares his teeth at the table, makes a kind of sucking noise. After a few moments his sister, very discreetly, begins collecting the dishes.

  At nine fifty Yuji is in his greatcoat on the drying platform, a woollen muffler wrapped over his skull and knotted beneath his chin. On his right sleeve he wears the armband Saburo gave him at nine forty-five, a white band on which Kyoko or the old woman has embroidered the character for fire. He has also been issued with a wooden rattle and a whistle on a length of string. At ten o’clock Miyo brings him tea, then he is alone again. Father will relieve him at two o’clock but two o’clock is a long way off. He sniffs, dabs at his nose, punches some warmth into his arms. One by one, with a soft metallic sound, the big orange leaves of the gingko tree are falling. He starts to pace, then stops and creeps to the platform parapet. Something is moving down there. One of the cats? He leans over, squints. A torch beam bursts against his face.

  ‘Don’t let me catch you sleeping,’ hisses Saburo, a voice without a body. ‘Don’t ever let me catch you sleeping!’

  The light clicks off. For half a minute Yuji is blind, then the night patiently reassembles itself. The tree, the far-off flickering of ‘Jintan Pills’, the undulating roofs, the decorative rake of searchlights above the palace. And finally, untellable at first from the fragments of beam at the backs of his eyes, the stars in their vast garrisons, glistening in the brittle air.

  2

  In the heart of the Low City, a man is lying under the front of a blue van. Only his legs are visible, two stout legs and a pair of feet in split-toed canvas boots. A small crowd has gathered, the sort who will stop to watch two birds fighting over a worm. Yuji, raw-eyed after three shifts on the platform in the eight nights since the meeting at Otaki’s, is kneeling at the side of the boots trying to decide whether he should mention the policeman who, at a policeman’s leisurely pace, is making his way past the line of traffic behind the van. What do they have in the back today? Radio valves, two or three sacks of charcoal, some light bulbs, a case or two of Korean brandy . . . How interested would a policeman be in such things?

  The legs are stirri
ng. ‘Give me a pull!’

  Yuji grips the canvas heels, leans back his weight. A stocky, moon-faced, middle-aged man appears, Grandfather’s neighbour, Mr Fujitomi.

  ‘Try her now.’

  In the cab, the ignition is a button on the floor. The first time Yuji tries it the engine rasps, sputters, dies. He tries again. This time it fires.

  ‘Tough as tanks,’ says Fujitomi, jumping up beside Yuji and using a sheet of newspaper to wipe the oil from his hands. ‘You could drive one of these all the way to Moscow.’ He swings shut the door. The policeman’s face floats in the wing mirror. Fujitomi frowns. ‘Let’s go,’ he says. ‘The river. Nice and gently.’

  After Grandfather’s illness, that event in the middle of the night that had left him for a few hours paralysed and barely able to call for help (‘It was,’ said Sonoko, ‘like the cawing of a bird’), Mr Fujitomi had made several neighbourly visits, each time bringing with him some little luxury – a half-dozen Californian lemons, a parcel of good tea or, on one occasion, a box of pharmaceuticals that Grandfather’s doctor had assured them were no longer available – and on each visit he sat for an hour by Grandfather’s head to listen, carefully, to the unintelligible sounds he made. On the third or fourth of these visits he found Yuji in the vegetable garden, prodding tentatively at the dry earth with one of Grandfather’s hoes. He had laughed at him, told him the garden would take care of itself until the spring then – after a pause in which he seemed to study Yuji carefully, to weigh him up – added that his son, Tamotsu, had received his red paper a month ago and was now with the Thirty-fifth Regiment somewhere in central China.

  ‘I hope he comes back soon,’ said Yuji.

  ‘You’re supposed to offer your congratulations,’ replied Fujitomi, ‘but I too hope he comes home soon. Tell me something. You know how to drive?’

  An hour later, on land at the back of Fujitomi’s house, Yuji was at the wheel of the blue Nissan receiving his first driving lesson. Driving, so it turned out, was quite a pleasurable activity. It was not even that difficult, as long as all he had to avoid was a few trees.

  ‘Tamotsu was my driver,’ explained Fujitomi. ‘And I have no other sons. Perhaps you could fill in for a while? Unless you have something better to do. There’s money, of course. You won’t be short.’

  ‘You want me to drive for you?’

  ‘Pick-ups and deliveries.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Pick-ups and deliveries. No heavy work.’

  There was one more afternoon driving circuits round the cedar trees, then early the following morning, a light mist on the road, they set off for the centre of Tokyo. Somehow – and even Fujitomi’s imperturbability was tested – they survived the near-miss with the bus in Akasaka, the many near misses with angry cyclists, the terrifying moment when Yuji came within the width of a sandal from reversing into a canal in Kyobashi.

  They picked up – sacks, boxes, sealed cases, crates, barrels. And they delivered – to hotels, to large houses, to the backs of businesses, to men who, looking somewhat like Mr Fujitomi, handed over grubby bundles of yen. Of these, at the end of the day, Yuji always received his share. By the first week of November, he could, had he wished it, have eaten at Kawashima’s three nights a week. He could even have afforded the Snow Goose if there had only been someone to take there. He forgot about Horikawa, about scribbling for a living. He found it amusing, though slightly disconcerting, that money could be made so simply. Pick up, deliver. Pick up, deliver. No heavy work.

  At the river (the engine has cut out twice more and twice more Fujitomi has crawled between the wheels), they cross at the Ryogoku Bridge. Their next collection is in Honjo, somewhere deep among its web of wires and chimney shadow. They pass temples, slums, little chaotic factories, then pull up beside a gate in a blackened wall. Yuji sounds the horn.

  ‘Got a new boy?’ asks the man who unlocks the gate.

  ‘Helping while Tamotsu’s across the water.’

  ‘The Thirty-fifth, isn’t it?’ asks the man. ‘Not a bad outfit. Long as he keeps his head down.’

  Under his coat – a civilian coat of black and white twill – the man is in puttees, breeches, a tunic with five brass buttons down the front. So too are the men who load the van. It’s not the first time in his new work that Yuji has seen this, and though Mr Fujitomi has offered no explanation, none, perhaps, is required. Rice, fuel, tobacco – even items like paper and soap – the army has them in abundance. All over the city there are depots, all over the country, soon, perhaps, all over Asia, each barracks, each camp, a new outlet, a fresh business. Is this what war is about? Not abstract concerns like racial destiny but the making of more and more money? A yen block to counter the dollar block, the sterling block? It is a view of things Yuji is not accustomed to, not yet. The soldiers, Mr Fujitomi, the likeable, practical men they meet in yards who snap open crates with a crowbar, who drag tarpaulins, who do impressive sums in their heads, seem part of a different system, a kind of parallel circuitry that has no more to do with sacrificial battles than it does, say, with poetry.

  The last job (a customer for the Korean brandy) is finished an hour after dark. Half an hour later Yuji drops down from the Nissan outside Grandfather’s gate. ‘Give the old fellow my regards,’ says Fujitomi, sliding across to the driver’s seat. ‘You’re staying the night?’

  ‘I have duties at home,’ says Yuji.

  ‘More of this fire-watching nonsense? Someone needs to sort that crank out.’ He pulls the day’s takings from the pocket of his coat, peels off the outermost note, passes it through the window. Yuji reaches up, takes the note between his fingers. There is something about the feel of this kind of money, money that does a job, that keeps itself busy. Some of the notes are worn soft as antique cotton. Crushed in the hand, they do not crease.

  ‘Until tomorrow, then!’

  ‘Until tomorrow.’

  Grandfather is in the eight-mat room, a buttressing of small cushions around his hips, a slate-coloured blanket over his shoulders. Sonoko is beside him, holding a bowl of tea, or something medicinal perhaps. On the other side of the brazier, Father, looking both bored and anxious, is smoking a cigarette. When Yuji comes in, Grandfather says something, then says it again.

  ‘Yes,’ says Yuji, hoping he has made sense of those knotted sounds. ‘It was good business today.’

  Grandfather nods, smiles a lopsided smile.

  Sonoko shuffles to the brazier, busies herself with the kettle.

  ‘There’s a train at quarter past,’ says Father, dropping the end of his cigarette onto the coals. ‘If we want to catch it, we should leave soon.’ He sits up, kneels formally. ‘Will you be all right?’ he asks the old man. ‘One us could probably stay if you wished it. And please remember the doctor will be here at nine tomorrow. He will want to take some blood. And please, give some consideration to my suggestion. The garden room in Hongo could be made most comfortable. It goes without saying that Sonoko would be welcome to accompany you.’

  Grandfather is waving an arm, angrily. He is saying something angrily. Father blinks at him, confused for a moment. ‘Noriko . . . ? Yes. Please do not concern yourself. I will take care of Noriko.’

  ‘You want to do the first shift tonight?’ asks Yuji as they follow the path through the garden.

  ‘It would be better for you to have it,’ says Father. ‘And I’ll come an hour earlier. Your rest is more necessary than mine.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say so.’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘I’m only the driver.’

  ‘Driving requires concentration.’

  ‘I quite enjoy it.’

  ‘You’ll get to know the city.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fujitomi seems a decent sort. Though it may be he sails a little close to the wind . . .’

  ‘It’s just pick-ups, deliveries . . .’

  They are passing the old rickshaw. In the dark under the tree it is almost invisible, the faintest g
leam from the painted wheels.

  ‘You think the story about the actor is true?’ asks Yuji.

  ‘What? Dragging him all the way to Kyoto? I used to think it wasn’t. Now, well . . . perhaps he did it after all.’

  ‘Yes, I think so too.’

  ‘By the way,’ says Father, ‘before you came, he was trying to say something about building a rickshaw. And something about the Bank of Japan? I had no idea, but Sonoko seemed to think you would know what it was about.’

  3

  One Sunday every month, for as long as Yuji can remember, he and Father have sat in their nightrobes at the table in the Western room to eat a Western breakfast. Rice, fish, natto and green tea are exchanged for bread rolls and coffee, kasutera cakes, smoked ham, cheese cut from large, waxy blocks. Almost all of it was bought from the German delicatessen on the Ginza. Now, without any discussion between them, they have stopped going there. Was it the fall of France? The bombing of the English cities? The rumours (they are barely more than that, little muffled stories carried in the remnants of the liberal press) of what, under the smoke of war, might be happening to the European Jews? So they have lost the peppercorn salami, the Jarlsberg, the paper-thin slices of Black Forest ham. Even the last of the coffee, Lohmeyer’s house blend, black as loam, has been abandoned, and today they are drinking another coffee, a lesser coffee, taken from a case with army markings in the back of the blue Nissan. There is no cause to complain, however. Having coffee at all makes them more fortunate than most, and kasutera cakes are still only ten sen a piece, sometimes less.

  On the table, yesterday’s newspaper lies open at a photograph, something quite artistic, of a soldier in silhouette, his arm flung back in readiness to hurl a grenade at the unseen enemy. Looking at it, Yuji thinks of Fumi Kihara and the giant match (‘Do you need that more than he does?’). Father is reading the journal of the Japanese Archaeological Society (‘Techniques for the Dating of Cultural Artefacts in Pre-Kofun-era Sites’). From somewhere in the garden, somewhere among the neatly etched shadows, comes the agitated twittering of sparrows.