A Charm
Omamori: Many Japanese people still carry a religious amulet, which they buy at a shrine or temple. It is made of a strip of paper, plastic or wood, on which some blessing or prayer is written. It is put in a small attractive cloth bag to be worn around the neck, carried in a purse, attached to a wallet, or hung in a car. People carry omamori, believing or expecting that it will protect them from misfortune, or that it will bring forth divine help in realising their wishes.
Yuko and Sato had agreed to meet by the terminal office at the pier. She said he was not hard to spot among the fishermen and old women who were waiting for the boat to dock. He stood with his back to her, dressed in a panama hat, cream linen trousers and a white shirt, with the sleeves rolled up. Before she could reach him, he turned round, and the rawness of her reaction made her breathless. She had seen romance at the cinema, in movies imported from Hollywood, but she watched those actresses and saw nothing of her own life. She was no Egyptian queen, or Broadway star or wife of a tsarist. She was a girl but this was her first experience of desire and it intoxicated her. Sato handed her a ticket and revealed they were going to Iōjima, a tiny island, thirty minutes from the city. They walked onto the gangway of the berthed ferry. Midweek, most of the seats on the lower deck were empty. They took the stairs up to the open air of the upper level. The engine kicked into life and the boat pulled away from the land and growled its way out to sea. Sato disappeared down the flight of steps and Yuko turned to watch Nagasaki grow smaller and smaller. The factories that lined the harbour shrank and faded against the darkening hills and brightening sky. She had never seen her home from this perspective, slowly reduced to such insignificant proportions.
The doctor returned with two glasses. He offered her a glass of barley tea and she sipped the chilled liquid. ‘He sat close enough for me to sense the sliver of air that separated us. He has that effect of magnifying everything around him: colours, noise, senses.’ She watched him put his glass down on the bench and light a cigarette. He leaned against the seat with his hat tipped back and his face to the sun. ‘I dislike the smell of tobacco, but today the odour, mixed with the salt spray of the sea, gave me a heady pleasure. He closed his eyes against the rays and I studied his profile. I have never been alone with a man in this intimate way. My gaze fell from his parted lips, down his neck to the triangle of skin between the collar of his open shirt, down the crisp, white material to his waistband and down farther still. I took him all in. When I glanced up, I could see he was watching me with an unknowable look.’ Embarrassed, Yuko moved to the back of the boat, but Sato followed her. He placed his elbows on the rail. Beneath them, the propellers spewed out a trail of white foam.
They stayed that way for some time, silent but not awkwardly so. Then he raised himself tall before he asked her, ‘I’m curious. Did you tell your parents you’re here with me?’ She considered whether to lie as she turned to face him. The wind whisked her hair against her mouth. He lifted his hand and moved the strands off her face and tucked them behind her ear. ‘I felt the stirring then, an aching pleasure somewhere below my stomach. I told him no, I had told no one. He smiled and moved closer, lowered his face to the side of my cheek and whispered in my ear, “Our little secret.” His mouth grazed the side of my face when he pulled away. I wish I could find the words to describe the feeling of that brief connection. Maybe no word exists for it but without the word how will I remember my reaction other than to repeat the spike of desire again and again until my body becomes its own dictionary?’
Iōjima came into view; the island was little more than a couple of mounds carpeted in green trees. The ferry rumbled into the harbour and minutes later she walked down the gangway. She watched a fisherman in a rowboat at work with his black cormorant. The bird launched from its master’s pole and dived beneath the surface. The bird seemed to swim beneath the water for a long time and Yuko stopped, worried that it might not return, but then it rose from the depths with a bream clutched in its beak and returned to the pole to drop the fish at its master’s feet. ‘I feel as if Sato is the fisherman and I am the bird.’
They followed a path that disappeared around the southern side of the island. Concrete defences lined the track. The barricades had been deposited to keep the waves from devouring the land. Sea lice scuttled between the crevices and the sun was white above their heads, thickening the air until their nostrils burned. They passed a field where hundreds of dragonflies hovered. The hum of beating wings echoed across the brown earth and yellow grass. The place pulsed with heat in a way that Yuko said made the land seem one produced of a fevered imagination. A boy and girl crouched next to a heap of the dead insects. The boy stood up and threw two clam shells linked by cotton thread in the air. A dragonfly, caught under the makeshift trap, fell to the grass and twitched and jerked until it became still. The girl ran over and picked its limp body up and added it to the pile. They began to count their catch and looked up to study the doctor and Yuko.
Another path broke from this main one and they followed it past a small boat, bleached by the sun and perched high on a pebble beach strewn with fishing nets. A line of fish, flattened and salted, hung between poles next to the boat. They reached a wooden cottage, barely more than a shack. A man stood in the doorway. He picked up a bucket, walked toward them and Yuko looked down as they passed him. Sea urchins clung to the bucket’s inside, their black spines interlocked. He would be taking them to market for the sushi restaurants of Nagasaki. Sato and Yuko turned one last corner and were met by a loop of white sand and grey rocks striated with pink and yellow quartz. A hundred yards from the shoreline, a wooden diving platform floated on the sea. Sato took off his shoes and socks and she followed him. Their feet sank into the burning sand until they reached a line of cycad trees. Sato pulled off his shirt and trousers until he wore only his swimming trunks. He ran down to the shore and crashed into the water, took strong strokes toward the bobbing platform.
Yuko peeled off her yukata and felt shy in the red swimsuit she had bought for the occasion. The material was so tight around her thighs, so low at the back. She had seen pictures of those modern Japanese girls in a magazine, walking around the streets of Tokyo in their striped beach pyjamas and wide-brimmed hats. She envied their confidence and their daring. How could they be so defiant, so free? Sato stood on the edge of the platform. He held his hand aloft in a wave and then dived in, disappeared long enough for her to worry for him as she had for the cormorant, but then he appeared in a rush of spray and he made his way back to shore. She walked down the beach until the tide licked her toes. Beige baby flounder, their orange-dotted scales half buried in the sand, charged away with a ripple of their fins. Small waves lapped against her ankles and shins as she made her way deeper. Sato reached her and stood up on the sea floor. Rivulets dropped down his hairless chest as he wiped his face.
‘You’ve never swum at all?’ He said they would start slowly and he told her to lean back and float. ‘Trust me. I’ll catch you, don’t worry.’ She lowered herself down, kicked her feet off the seabed and lay flat. Sato’s two hands held her back and the top of her legs. ‘That’s my kappa. We’ll make a water spirit of you yet.’ She looked up and the sun shone over Sato’s shoulder so that he was little more than a black cloud of a man. She floated and listened to the crackle of unseen coral reefs and the blood pumping in her ears. ‘Jomei moved his hands and cupped them against the side of my chest and thighs, pulled me closer to him until my torso was pressed against his stomach. Somewhere on the island, I knew there was life other than the doctor: there was a fisherman and a bucket of sea urchins, a boy and girl and a pile of dead dragonflies, but in that moment, there was only me and Jomei, the sea and a diving platform, and his skin against mine.’
Later they sat on the rocks and stared at the water. ‘You did well today, you’ll make a fine swimmer.’ She thanked him and searched for something to say. ‘It’s kind of you to give up your time.’ He said he wa
s glad of the excuse to come back to the island. He had come here often as a student. Yuko stood up and went to look in a pool, lifting up stones as she searched for signs of life among the seaweed. She glanced up and saw that Sato was studying her. ‘It felt as if he was appraising me. I wonder what he sees. A child? I must seem so half-formed to him.’ He joined her, hunched down, rested his arms on his knees. ‘So what do we have here?’ They peered into the shallows at a crab scuttling sideways, yellow-and-black periwinkles, red anemones shiny as eyeballs, shrimp and even a tiny blue starfish. ‘It’s like staring into childhood,’ he said. Yuko wanted to tease him. ‘I thought Japan didn’t need poets?’ He smiled and she saw him look at the scar on her leg. ‘It’s ugly, yes?’ He disagreed. ‘Treat it like a map of your life. You know, you should ride a bicycle. One accident shouldn’t stop you. Your mother was always so careful.’ This surprised her. ‘You knew Mother?’
‘Not well,’ he answered. Curiosity led Yuko to the next question. ‘I asked why my parents had never mentioned him before Father arranged my appointment at the hospital. He said Mother didn’t like him. I asked why. She thought he had been a bad influence on Father when they were younger. Was he? He nodded his head in agreement but he did not laugh as I had expected. Next he had a question for me. Why had I not told my parents about the swimming lessons? I ran my hand down the scar and told him the truth. I didn’t want them to say no.’
When they met the following week at the ferry terminal, he was waiting with two bicycles. She held her hand to her mouth to stifle the laughter. ‘I can’t ride.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t believe you. Here, take this one, we’ll try when we reach Iōjima.’ Her first attempts made her squeal in terror and delight but soon enough she could stand on the pedals, her arms straight, hot air on her face, the sun on her hair. They kept the bicycles on the island, discarded under a tree at the beach, or chained to the post at the pier. She took her sketchbook on several visits but she drew him just once, on August 22, and only then because he was too tired to complain. Surgery had kept him up most of the night, meningitis, the child saved but limbs lost. He was dozing when she pulled the pad and pencil from her bag. She watched his chest rise and fall as she drew the outline of him and then filled in the detail. ‘The heat shimmered just beyond him and his skin glowed honey gold in the sun. The nectar of him.’
When he woke up he gave her sketch pad a rueful look. She showed her effort to him, shy with the longing those lines of charcoal revealed. He nodded and handed it back to her. ‘You don’t like it?’ He told her he looked old. She found this funny and felt that need again to tease him, as if poking him with a soft stick of bamboo. ‘How old are you?’ He raised his eyebrows and sat up. ‘Well, how old is your father?’ She thought for a moment. ‘So old, older than the oldest turtle in the world.’ He hung his head in defeat. ‘In that case, I’m two months older than that.’ Yuko let her curiosity bubble to the surface. She dared ask her next question. ‘So have you been married as long as him? I saw your wife, I think, at the hospital, the day we met. She’s beautiful.’ He nodded.
‘I saw him assessing me again, the way he had that day by the rock pool. “She is beautiful, yes. She is the envy of women and I am the envy of men.” I didn’t like him talking this way. His words made me feel jealous and seem foolish. A stupid girl with some silly infatuation, but I was too thirsty for more information. “How did you meet?” He told the story of them. Her name is Natsu, she is five years younger than him, the daughter of a colleague. She was impossible to resist for many reasons, he said. “We were young, she seemed perfect, as youth does to youth. Then we grew up.” He paused as if reaching for the right words. “My wife is like my sister, do you understand?” I did not and he saw this. “Maybe it’s good that you don’t.”’
He looked to the sea. ‘I think you’re ready now.’ She did not know what he meant. ‘Today you’re going to go all the way to the diving platform.’ The square of wood rolled gently in the tide. ‘It’s too far. I can’t.’ He chided, ‘Of course you can. I’ll be right behind you. Don’t tell me you’re scared?’ This annoyed her. She said nothing and ran into the water. The tide was with her and she was determined to prove herself, however awkward her strokes were or however much water she swallowed. Just a few feet from the platform he swam past her, a neat crawl, showing off, but she did not care, she had made it. She grabbed the rusting metal and hauled herself up, breathless, the panic of the swim dying away. He was sitting with his back to her. She joined him, as the tide slapped at the wood and shadows of fish darted below.‘We watched the water, silent but content in the stillness of Iōjima.’
When they did talk, he spoke of his childhood in Kumamoto, the war games he and his brother Tenri played in the field by their home, the day Tenri left to join the army in 1917, the night the telegram came of his death three years later in Shanghai, the morning his belongings were returned in a square box, letters written by Sato bound by a shoelace placed inside the wisteria wood. ‘He kept staring at the water and I wanted to offer some solace. I told him, “But he died a hero then, fighting for his country.” He took his time to answer. “He died in a fight, yes, not on a battlefield, in some opium den, down a street called Blood Alley, where a child was included in the price of a beer.” His revelation frightened me. I realised I knew nothing of life. My parents have kept me so cocooned. I am hungry for more knowledge, not of opium dens, but of other experiences life can offer up. Jomei lay back on the salt-stained wood and I wondered how it felt to live with the loss of someone so close to you. “You keep a photograph of him on your desk. You must be proud of him.” He turned to look at me. “It doesn’t matter how he died, he was still my brother. We’ll always be two young boys playing in the mud, not the men we grew up to be.” I wanted to reach for him then. Hold his hand. Rest my head on his chest. Know the right words to say. Instead I felt the creep of fear at how precious our time together was, how finite. These days with Jomei are rubies of joy. I can swim well enough. I no longer need lessons. I asked him how long our trips to the island would last. He raised himself up on his elbows. “The visits will end when the crickets start to sing.” I smiled at this and so did he. “It seems I really am a poet, Yuko.” We both laughed. No, I cannot imagine my life without Iōjima, without him. Did I dare tell him this? I could not. Instead I told him, “I’ll miss this island. I’m happy here.” Maybe this embarrassed him. He rose to his feet, reached for my hand and pulled me up. “Come on, race you to the beach.” He jumped into the sea and I shouted, “Not fair, cheat, wait.” By the time I made it back to the shore, he was standing beside our bags, clapping as I dragged myself from the surf. I remember laughing as my lungs burned, the taste of salt on my lips, and my exhilaration made me careless. I was too close to the rocks, too distracted by Jomei as I watched him reach for a towel. I took one step and a searing heat shot up through my foot. The pain made me cry out his name and as I fell to my knees he came running toward me.’
The Chirping of Crickets
Mushi-no-ne: In autumn suzumushi (bell ring insect), matsumushi (a kind of cricket) and korogi (common cricket) start singing. This singing of the insects strikes the right chord in the heart of Japanese people. They find something sad and lonely in these chirpings, realising the end of the hot summer, the coming of the severe winter, the short lives of the insects, and by association the mutation of life.
He ran to her as she sat on the shoreline. ‘I think it’s a jellyfish,’ she said, holding her foot. He knelt down and looked at her sole. ‘Sea urchin. We’ll have to get the spines out. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine I promise. Can you walk?’ She could not. He told her to put her arms around his neck and he scooped her up. ‘I’m too heavy.’ He smiled. ‘No, you’re not. Hold on.’ Her foot throbbed as the venom went to work. ‘Jomei, it hurts.’ He reassured her he would get rid of the pain as they made their way to the front door of the nearest cottage. He shouted out and a woman, dressed in trousers and a smock,
appeared in the entrance. ‘Can we have some vinegar, boiling water and a razor, if you have one?’ She beckoned them inside and Sato placed Yuko on the floor, lifted her foot and began to pull black needles from her flesh. He sterilised the razor and then dragged it over the inflamed patch of skin. Next he rubbed the vinegar over her foot. When the treatment was finished the woman offered them tea. Sato thanked her but said they should get back to the mainland. He helped Yuko dress while the woman took one of the bicycles to a lean-to. ‘I hopped to the entrance of the cottage and climbed onto the saddle of the other bike and held on to Jomei’s waist as he began to pedal away. I turned to wave at the woman in thanks but she had already disappeared inside her home. His muscles must have ached with the effort but he did not stop until we reached the pier. As we took the boat home, he created a footrest with our bags, checked the swelling, reassured me I’d recover. I thought of the moment he picked me up in his arms, the concern on his face, the kindness of his voice. I understand so little of life but his actions hinted at the hope I carried: Jomei did care for me.
A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding Page 5