One Morning Like a Bird

by Andrew Miller

  ‘I wonder what it will be?’ says Miyo, arriving from the street, her cheeks bright with cold.

  ‘What what will be?’ asks Yuji.

  ‘The reason,’ she says.

  ‘The reason?’

  ‘For going,’ she says. ‘The reason for going.’

  Father lowers the journal, takes the cigarette from his mouth, and looks at her over the top of his glasses. ‘What are you talking about?’ he asks.

  ‘The notice,’ she says.

  ‘On the Kitamuras’ gate?’ asks Father.

  She nods.

  ‘A new one?’

  She nods.

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘You have to go there at noon.’

  ‘Today? Yuji, you better have a look.’

  It’s ten forty-five. Yuji finishes his coffee, dresses. The notice – this one in red ink – employs the same semi-official language as the others, and commands all members of the neighbourhood association and the women’s defence group, to report to the block captain’s house at twelve o’clock, Sunday, for a demonstration.

  ‘Even soldiers get Sunday off,’ mutters Itaki, reading the notice over Yuji’s shoulder. ‘At this rate we might as well all volunteer. Oh, by the way, Mrs Otaki says you can get sugar . . .’

  ‘I’ll ask,’ says Yuji.

  ‘And flour?’

  ‘I’ll ask.’

  ‘We should have made you block captain,’ says Itaki, turning back towards his shop. ‘I said it all along.’

  Promptly at noon they file into the Kitamura house, fifteen men and women, shuffling along the corridor of beaten earth behind Grandma Kitamura. Because the nature of the demonstration has remained a mystery, some of the neighbours are dressed formally as if for a visit to a government office, while others have put on overalls, boots, headscarves. They pass through the house and out into the garden. In the pond, under the dirty gold of its surface, Yuji glimpses the mottled back of a carp. Saburo and Kyoko are waiting at the bottom of the garden. Kyoko is wearing a pair of monpe trousers. They are not as elegant as those worn by the model in the newspaper. They make her legs look shorter, her hips broader.

  Saburo is in a white military work tunic. He has a pickaxe over his shoulder. He starts shouting at them while they are still some distance off. He tells them they are on the front-line now, that they must develop the Yamamoto spirit, that the enemy could arrive at any time, right here, in Tokyo. ‘That sky,’ he bawls, pointing, ‘could turn black with enemy planes. We have to get ready for that! We have to get ready today!’ He glares at them, sucks in a deep breath, steadies himself, throws down his crutch and raises the pickaxe. After a dozen swings he looks round at Kyoko. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  She starts to dig, tipping out with her shovel the ground he has broken. ‘You, too, Granny,’ says Saburo, roping together the two halves of an entrenching tool.

  The neighbours neither move nor speak. The digging is very slow. After half an hour Mr Kawabata has to sit. An hour passes. The sweat drips from Saburo’s nose. He swings and falls, gets up and swings again. Kyoko, in her baggy trousers, shovels dully, competently, as if through a dung heap on her father’s farm. After two hours they stop. The old woman’s face is violently flushed.

  Saburo addresses them again. ‘Trenches! Every household! Trenches to shelter in! Takano family, you have the biggest garden. You will set an example by digging the biggest trench. The deepest. Now go home. And remember, if you don’t want to roast, you better dig!’

  Yuji helps Mr Kawabata to stand. Mrs Kawabata, wearing her women’s defence sash, is quietly weeping. ‘We’ll just have to roast,’ she says, once they have reached the safety of the street. ‘Old people like us won’t have a chance anyway. Excuse me,’ she says, ‘for saying something improper, but I hope it happens soon. After all, it’s not much to look forward to, is it?’

  The neighbours, avoiding each other’s eyes, turn away to their houses.

  Up in the sewing room, mid-afternoon, a woollen jacket over his knees, Yuji is allowing himself to drift towards sleep. Now he has the fire-watching, the days in the blue van, sleep is something he would like to store up, to have a reserve of to set against a future scarcity, for it seems inevitable now that he and everyone else is entering a time when they will peer at the world through the smoke-glass of an inassuagable fatigue. He lets the book (Les Fleurs du Mal) slide from his grip, lets his chin drop towards his chest, sighs, and sees, in the lasts instants of consciousness – the first, perhaps, of dreaming – a sun-cleaned image of Kyoko shovelling the earth in her garden, while the young cat, the absurdly named Foreign Girl, limps over the grass towards him.

  When he wakes, coming to suddenly in the twilit room with no sense of how long he has slept, he feels oddly calm, sober and calm, as if, in sleep, some old difficulty has found an unexpected resolution, though what difficulty, what resolution, he cannot tell himself. He is stretched there, willing the moment to go on a little longer, when he hears noises from outside, from the garden, and turns his head sharply towards the platform door. He listens for a second, then scrambles to his feet, opens the door, and goes onto the platform. Saburo is leaning over the fence (what is he standing on?). He is leaning over the fence and shouting at Father.

  ‘You think I should come over and dig it for you? Are you afraid to get a blister on your hands? This is a final warning! If the trench is not started before nightfall . . .’

  And father says something back, a low voice, a slow voice. Whatever it is he says it leaves Saburo speechless.

  Yuji hurries down the stairs, slips at the turn, bounces down the last few steps, almost knocks over Miyo. He meets Father at the door of the Western room. ‘Please excuse me,’ he says. ‘I ought to have started it. I will start immediately.’

  He goes into the kitchen. Haruyo is steaming tofu for Mother’s evening meal. The look he gives her, loaded with rage, visibly unsettles her. He takes the lean-to key from its peg beside the door and goes out to the narrow path (the tradesmen’s path) that runs between the kitchen and the spindle hedge. He unlocks the lean-to. The air in there still tastes of summer, preserved somehow around the blades of tools, in the heat-warped wood of cobwebbed shelves. He chooses a mattock and walks through the garden holding it across his hips like a rifle. He should ask for Father’s advice, of course, for his instructions, but he starts to dig near the old pine stump, hacking at the ground until, after ten minutes, the muscles in his back begin to spasm. He crouches, brow against the mattock’s haft, cools off, then starts again, a slower, less angry rhythm that stops only when he can no longer clearly see his feet. If he is going to continue, he will need some light, and he is crossing the garden to fetch a lantern when Father summons him from the open door of the garden study. They go inside together.

  ‘I was just fetching a lantern,’ says Yuji.

  ‘Listen to me,’ says Father. He pauses. ‘I have phoned Kensuke. I have told him of our situation. I have told him I am no longer certain of my ability to protect your mother. Her tranquillity.’

  ‘You’re going to the farm?’

  ‘We will take the express on Wednesday.’

  ‘Wednesday!’

  ‘Tomorrow I will go to Setagaya. I will explain things.’

  ‘And me?’

  ‘You?’

  ‘You wish me to remain here?’

  ‘For us all to leave would draw . . . unnecessary attention.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I have an obligation to your mother.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If we stayed. If something happened . . .’

  ‘When will you return?’

  ‘That will depend. Not, perhaps, until after the New Year. Do you need money?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It may be easier for you when we have gone. I regret that we have not been able to help you more.’

  ‘I have been a burden to you . . .’ says Yuji, mechanically.

  ‘You seem to be managing we
ll enough these days.’

  ‘With Mr Fujitomi?’

  ‘You may end up a man of business, like your grandfather.’

  ‘It seems unlikely.’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps.’

  ‘It’s a long time since Mother travelled,’ says Yuji.

  ‘Yes,’ says Father. ‘Quite a long time.’

  The window is a narrow rectangle a degree or so less utterly dark than the book-lined blackness of the study. Father has almost disappeared, can be seen only peripherally, as certain remote objects in the night sky are seen, by not looking at them directly. Again, they have come to the edge of a conversation, that long-postponed confessing that would begin – and either could begin it – with the words ‘After Ryuichi . . .’. It might have freed them once (these two who have taken a certain pride in not speaking), but now, it seems, the time for it has passed. They have changed. They have been changed. Between them, the tilt of circumstance is quite different.

  In the room the air is peppery against the lining of Yuji’s nose. He sniffs, dabs his nostrils with a finger. ‘The Wednesday express?’ he asks. For all he can see of Father, he might as well be speaking to himself.

  4

  Yuji is in the first car with Mother and Father. Haruyo and Miyo and most of the luggage are in the car behind. As the cars arrived late (held up by some parade in Iidabashi) and loading them took longer than expected, Father is fidgeting with the shirt cuff above his watch and scowling at the back of the driver’s head.

  Yuji cannot take his eyes from Mother. How strange, how extraordinary to see her with the common light of day washing over her face! She smiles at him, but when the movement of the car jolts them in their seats she shuts her eyes as if in pain. She ought, thinks Yuji, to travel in a palanquin, or like an heirloom doll, wrapped in tissue paper inside a cedar box. How will she manage the train? And then another hour of driving, the twisting ascent to the farm on roads that at each sharp turn become rougher and narrower, more track than road? He is afraid for her, but feels too a flickering excitement, as though they were all setting off on a family outing, a trip to view the chrysanthemums at Dangozaka, a restaurant by the river. Even to the kabuki . . .

  At the station, two elderly porters help them with the luggage, leading the way, puffing and calling briskly for room. The Kyoto train has almost finished boarding. At the windows, little parties, or single men or women are readying themselves for the awkward moment of farewell. The porters carry the cases inside. Father and Haruyo follow them up the steps. On the platform, Yuji and Miyo wait with Mother. Miyo is shaking with sobs. Mother murmurs to her, their heads close together, but the girl can neither look up nor reply.

  Father climbs down from the train. ‘There’s not much time,’ he says.

  Mother takes his arm. She turns to Yuji. ‘I will be thinking of you,’ she says.

  He nods. ‘I will be thinking of you also.’

  They look at each other, the ghost and her son, as if they were alone together. He hopes she cannot see the fear that has taken hold of him, the wild certainty that once she has stepped onto the train he will never see her again, that she will die (fade to nothing), or he will die (in some shell-hole in China). Father and Haruyo help her up the steps, almost carrying her. As soon as she is inside, the porters jump down and swing the door shut. A ragged ball of smoke rolls down the carriage roofs. A minute later the whole train shudders, rocks backwards, and begins, with the appearance of immense effort, to creep along the platform. Father struggles with the compartment window, forces it open. ‘I will inform you of our arrival,’ he says. Is that what he says? He can hardly be heard, hardly, in the sudden flow of steam, be seen. Yuji waves to him, then, in a gesture stolen from the cinema screen – Hotel du Nord? The Citadel? – he lifts his peach-bloom trilby from his head and holds it high until the last carriage is lost in the sunlight of midday and there are only the shining rails, narrowing and curving into the distance.

  At the house, Miyo follows him like Asako’s daughter. She looks at him with anxious, childish glances, while all around them the empty rooms give off some low electric hum of absence. They go from room to room. Surely, if they are patient, if they listen hard enough, they will hear a voice, the scrape of a wooden sole on the verandah.

  He opens the doors to Mother’s room. Everything in there – the sitting cushions, the red lacquer table in the alcove, the folding screen with its birds and willows, the not-quite-cold brazier – seems subtly unfamiliar, as though two hours’ abandonment has remade them into not-quite-perfect replicas of themselves. From habit he looks for his brother, but the photograph and the cross have gone, leaving only their shadows on the sand-coloured wall.

  He walks out of the room, slides shut the screens. He will not go in there again. He tells Miyo to put on warm clothes, clothes she can work in, then goes upstairs and changes into a pair of old trousers, an old pullover. She is waiting for him by the bottom of the stairs. He looks at her, manages a smile, and wonders what will become of her, how well she will survive these coming times. If his red paper arrives – and who is to say it will not come tonight? – she cannot remain in the house on her own. Would she want to go to Kyoto? Or back to her family in the north, the poverty of a home she has not seen in five years? If she wanted to stay in Tokyo, perhaps he could arrange something at the telephone exchange. The young girls there live together in dormitories. She would make friends. Be safe? Safe at least from Block Captain Kitamura.

  He collects the tools from the lean-to and leads her down to the pine stump. They work, one behind the other, digging as if the sky might indeed, at any moment, grow dark with enemy planes. By dusk, their faces streaked with black sweat, they are stood to their thighs in a crooked mouth of raw soil. Yuji clambers out, reaches down a hand to Miyo. They sit on the ground, panting, feeling the cold steal into them as their sweat evaporates. She starts to cry again. He does not know what to say. He waits, fingering the blisters on his palms, until her sobs are quieter. ‘Are you hungry?’ he asks. She nods, wipes her nose on her wrist. They leave the tools in the trench, walk slowly through the garden to the unlit house.

  5

  The professor’s absence is quickly noted, becomes for a week the favourite subject of local gossip, particularly the fact that his wife, an invalid, a woman barely seen in years, has gone with him, along with that frightening maid of hers. To veiled enquiries Yuji makes veiled replies. To Saburo’s veiled taunts he says nothing.

  The season’s cold intensifies. He begins to dread the nights on the platform. There is no one now to relieve him at two a.m, no mumbled exchange before sinking down into a dreamless sleep. Miyo would take a turn if he asked her to but he cannot (those thin arms, thin legs) find it proper to make such a request. So the nights are his own, an interminable bridge of hours, of tedium, of cold.

  For his duty, this first week in December, he has put on so many layers of clothing his moon-thrown shadow on the outside wall of Father’s room is large as a bear’s. He does not know what the time is – to look at his watch would mean exposing a strip of skin to the air – but he knows (his growing familiarity with stars, with grades of darkness) there are at least four or five hours before the first streaks of the dawn. Too tired even to yawn, he leans against one of the drying posts, listens to the calling of owls, and lets his gaze carry him over roofs and ghostly radio aerials to where the red eye of ‘Jintan Pills’ blinks on, blinks off, blinks on, blinks off. Why, tonight, does the sign bring such odd associations with it? Lilacs, light on silver cutlery, an arm swathed in white and yellow stripes.

  He peers into the Kitamura garden, his eyes picking between the shadows, then goes on stiff legs to his room and starts, with only moonlight to help him, to search for the jacket he last wore that day of high summer in the Azabu Hills. He finds it between two others, hanging from the beading, then finds, in the left-hand pocket, the half-dozen little pills Dick Amazawa dropped there. He puts one on his tongue, hesitates, then adds another. All he has
to wash them down with is a mouthful of the Korean brandy he keeps in a corner of the platform to stave off the worst of the cold. He drinks, swallows, shudders, resumes his watch.

  After fifteen minutes the blood directly under the surface of his skin begins to simmer. Ten minutes after that he is grinding his teeth and shuffling restlessly across the slats of the platform deck. Should he have taken just one of the pills? A half? Too late now. If he has poisoned himself, then this is how he will end, a heap of clothes in which a man is hidden, his face to the stars. He rocks on the balls of his feet, observes, with some fascination, the mist of his own breath as it trails past his cheek. The night is ticking like a clock. The moon gives off a hiss of distant burning. The desire to lie down, to sleep, has been replaced by an equally urgent desire to explain himself to someone, to justify, to lay out his life in a great flood of words . . . Should he wake Miyo? Is it time for another pill? One more pill and his body might be shocked into poetry! He might even understand what Amazawa wants for the Unit, what Ishihara’s vision of the future is. Death as a religion? Violent death?

  He is standing there, tense with the effort of keeping up with his own thoughts, when the noise, the racket at the edge of hearing he has been hoping would simply fade away, becomes, instead, more insistent. Wooden clappers. A drum. He listens, strains to hear, hears, understands, but cannot quite believe it. He is fire-watching and somewhere – or so the noises tell him – there is a fire. A real fire! He scans the 150 degrees of his view from the platform. Nothing there, nothing at all. What is the procedure now? What is he supposed to do? Call Saburo? Use his whistle? He has not, he realises, paid much attention to the scant instructions he has received, nor has he read the recently issued government manual – other than to glance at the title (Stay and Fight!) – a copy of which is under a pile of newspapers on the dresser downstairs.