Fire in Summer

by JH Fletcher

  ‘Not only a talker,’ he protested.

  ‘Perhaps. But I have yet to see it.’

  Craig flew from Singapore to Adelaide, dullness in his heart and mind. Away from Yukiko his doubts had returned; their backgrounds, lifestyle, even the basic assumptions governing their existence, were as far apart as ever.

  He had told her that the problems they faced must be overcome or ignored. He had said they had to force a solution. He had called her his love. He had meant everything he had said, when he had said it. And now?

  Words.

  Heavy thoughts, indeed.

  He had not told Melanie he was coming, so there was no-one to meet him when he passed through Immigration at Adelaide airport: the usual surly reception to start what had all the makings of a surly day.

  He caught a taxi to his unit overlooking the city, the placid green swerve of the Torrens River with the cricket oval on its bank. Home. Even in his present mood, it was good to be here. He liked the city for its own sake and because it was the gateway to the mid-north. Adelaide had been kind to him, he was content in the city, yet the land would always be important to him.

  What is it about the land? he thought. Once it has its hooks in you, it never lets go. That sense of ownership of or by the land is implanted in you in the same way and at the same moment that the sperm implants itself in the egg. It is impossible to escape because, in their hearts, escape is the last thing its victims want. They accept their servitude gladly, even as they resent it.

  If, God forbid, anything happened to Michael, he knew he’d be there in a flash. The heart was a farmer’s heart, despite all. But where did that leave Yukiko? Try as he might, he could not see her in the mid-north, bartering over the price of eggs.

  He unpacked. In his suitcase discovered an envelope that Yukiko, without his knowledge, had placed there. Inside it, in writing that he realised in wonderment that he had never seen before, a verse:

  Think of me

  In the common pathos

  Of an autumn sky,

  Even though your heart

  Be captured by the moon.

  Craig’s heart twisted painfully within him. Dear God.

  41

  YUKIKO

  1999

  There was a ton of work waiting for Yukiko when she got back to the office, more than enough to keep her mind occupied during the day. The nights were a different story. Then, during the long hours, her sleep was plagued by uneasy dreams. The visions were frantic and confused: of snow-clad mountains, a distorted coast of rocks and spray and leering faces. Seas more ferocious than Hokusai’s Great Wave reared upon her, and a voice said, over and over, This is the woman, while in the background swelled the metallic resonance of a mighty gong.

  She woke, terrified, sweat-drenched. Lay with pounding heart until the horror drained away. Then was afraid to go back to sleep in case it returned.

  Osaka is no longer my place, she told herself. It is two years since I was there last, but I know I shall never be happy there. Yet I am Japanese. Where is home, if not Japan?

  Australia? she thought. Craig had said nothing, but she knew. He wanted her to go to Australia with him. Any day now he would ask her. What would she say when he did?

  One part of her wanted to say yes. The affirmation filled her heart, the darkness of the room in which she lay. Yes; yes.

  But only one part. For the rest …

  I am Japanese, she thought. How can Australia become my place? It cannot; unless my place is Craig himself. Is it? Yes. No.

  I miss him, I want him with me now. I hunger for his presence, the comfort of his touch, the understanding with which he looks at me. The sense that together we are one. I miss all of it. But in Australia, would he be the same? Would I?

  A difficult question, indeed.

  She thought of Aunt Sumiko, prevented by custom from marrying until after her older sister and then not doing so because the man she loved had been killed in the war. She thought of her dead father, stern and resolute in the old customs; she had held the identity discs that her grandfather had worn, sat beside him on his flight into the doom-weighted Queensland forests.

  Even dead they are alive to me, as are all the past generations of the Japanese race. What will they say if I turn my back on my heritage and marry Craig Warren?

  She knew without doubt that they would condemn her. She accepted their right to make such a judgment, took its weight upon her conscience, yet felt herself neither bound nor released by it. It is still my decision.

  Many other Japanese women had married foreigners, but she was not another woman. She was herself. She knew that if she turned her back on her heritage, she would cease to exist as a Japanese. Which meant she would cease to exist for herself, also.

  I am as much a citizen of the world as you are. She had told Craig so, and it was true. But she was also Japanese. It would have been easier had her heart pulled one way, her brain the other, but now it was her heart alone that was being ripped apart. It wanted her both to go and to stay, when to do either, in happiness, might prove impossible.

  She remembered what Craig had said during their holiday in the Cameron Highlands, the time that now she thought of as their honeymoon.

  We must force it.

  Which they had done. For a day or two, it had seemed to work. Was working still, it seemed, if she were to spend sleepless nights agonising over whether to marry a man who had not even asked her.

  I must be sure, she thought. Now, perhaps, was the time to apply force, once again.

  She was adept at the body language that said Keep Off, so Allan Barker, deputy head of New Issues at the bank, had never come onto her, although she knew that he had always been interested. Now, deliberately, she changed: in what way even she could not have said. She smiled when she met him, but then she always had. They chatted in the corridors, but they had always done that, too. Yet he got the message, as she had intended.

  ‘Free to have dinner with me next Friday?’

  ‘That would be nice.’ If I enjoy his company, she thought, if I permit certain things, I shall know I am cured of Craig Warren.

  They went to a very grand restaurant in Orchard Road. The decor was lavish, with many floor to ceiling mirrors, the food was fine, the service top-rate. Allan bought her an orchid at the beginning of the evening; escorted her to her door at the end of it; in between was amusing, interesting, fun to be with. He made her laugh, did everything he could to make the evening a success. It was a success.

  She felt nothing for him at all. The idea of kissing him even politely, never mind with passion, seemed not repulsive but ludicrous. Instead she gave him her hand. He made no issue of it; they both knew the evening had been an experiment that would not be repeated.

  Why? she asked herself desperately, knowing that some questions were unanswerable.

  A visiting executive from one of Japan’s major corporations decided to try his luck. She let him, within limits. This time it was harder. He wasn’t happy about the limits and tried to brush them aside. Things got a bit fraught before he finally got the message that no meant No.

  Damn Craig Warren, she thought. Why did he have to be an Australian? Even the absurdity of the question failed to make her smile.

  She was halfway determined to make a finish, to bury the relationship in what Craig had called the too-hard basket. Then, unexpectedly, he phoned. It was not to ask her to join him in Australia, it was not about anything in particular, but the sound of his voice weakened her resolve.

  She was scheduled to visit Osaka in April. I shall go, she thought. I shall soak myself once again in the atmosphere of my home town, my country. Then I shall decide what I must do.

  Yukiko walked through the concourse of Osaka International Airport, watching the frenzy all about her, listening to the metallic echo of announcements screeching endlessly. Outside the terminal would be the crowded streets she remembered, the same buildings, the same restaurants selling Japanese and American food; without thin
king she could trace the route the taxi would take to bring her to her aunt’s place in the suburbs.

  Yet in fact things were not at all as they had been. In the two years since she had last been here, there had been numerous changes. Many of the buildings she remembered were gone, replaced by skyscrapers that leaned over the teeming traffic most fearfully. Everywhere was dust and noise. Many things were familiar, yet nothing was the same. She had come home to a city that was home no longer.

  ‘I thought the economy was supposed to be in recession,’ she said to the taxi driver.

  ‘Not any more,’ the man told her in a Tokyo accent. ‘Things are going full steam ahead. You should see the capital,’ he said proudly. ‘Ten times busier than this.’

  ‘I hope to go there later,’ she said.

  ‘Take the Bullet Train,’ he advised her. ‘The roads are impossible, but the train takes no time at all. You are not from Osaka?’ he asked.

  At one time no taxi driver would have asked such a personal question; Yukiko told herself she didn’t mind, but in truth did: not the question, but the fact of change itself. In her normal life, change was the norm; here, in the city of her birth, it made her uncomfortable. Osaka had no business to change so much behind her back.

  She smiled wryly at the thought. Certain assumptions governed everyone’s life. You took it for granted that the air you breathed would not poison you; that the ground would remain firm beneath your feet; that home would remain as it had always been. In Japan, none of these assumptions held true. In the attack on the Tokyo underground, sarin gas had replaced oxygen; earthquakes had always been part of Japanese life; now the pace of change — of people, beliefs, environment — overwhelmed memory.

  No security anywhere, she thought. No wonder Osaka is full of bikie gangs. At this rate we shall all end up paranoid. Although what she herself believed she could not have said.

  Belatedly, she answered the taxi driver’s question. ‘Yes, I am an Osaka girl.’

  He eyed her suspiciously in the mirror. ‘You don’t sound it.’

  ‘I live overseas. I’ve probably lost the accent.’

  ‘Good, good.’ The man, himself an exile in a city that had always prided itself on its superiority in all things, was gratified. ‘Earning plenty of money, I bet?’ And again the eyes assessed her in the mirror.

  ‘I get by.’

  ‘Good. Good.’

  He clearly regarded her as an ally in the face of Osaka’s intractable provincialism. The taxi’s engine blared triumphantly as he accelerated.

  At least Aunt Sumiko’s house had not changed, but then change and Aunt Sumiko were as far apart as it was possible to be. Her maid opened the door. Only the very wealthiest of people had servants nowadays, but Sumiko was of the old school; it had never occurred to her to carry out her own domestic chores.

  Eyes as sharp as ever in the wizened, monkey face, Sumiko inspected the uncrushable Bally suit that Yukiko had worn for travelling.‘Very smart, dear …’ But did not approve. She had told Yukiko once that, when she was young, she too had preferred western dress, but those days were long gone. Now she was wearing a colourful kimono, looking down on the more sombre colours that had been fashionable in the Tokyo of her youth and that nowadays might have seemed more appropriate to her age.

  Most of the house had been built in the Japanese style, but there was a European-type parlour where Aunt Sumiko spent most of her time. After Yukiko had unpacked, she found her aunt there, and they settled down to have a good gossip.

  Sumiko told her all her news, consisting mostly of tales about neighbours whom Yukiko had never met in her life. A retired professor was making quite the wrong name for himself over a young girl; poor Mrs Fujiyama, whose husband beat her; the Okubata couple who fancied themselves because they had a granddaughter in Chicago …

  Eventually, Sumiko said, ‘Now you must tell me what you’ve been up to.’

  It was never easy. The old lady had never been outside Japan — for most of the year seldom left her house — and to talk to her about international banking in a city like Singapore, surrounded by Chinese people of whom Sumiko had disapproved since the China Incident over sixty years before, was an impossibility.

  Nevertheless Yukiko tried, giving her aunt a simplified and highly glamorised account of her life overseas.

  ‘I have never understood why you wanted to go there at all,’ Sumiko said. ‘Osaka was always good enough for me.’ Then she brightened. ‘I have been watching the weather forecasts,’ she said. ‘The weather in Kyoto has been very good, cool but not too much rain.’

  This was excellent news. Yukiko had chosen to come home now because it was the right time to see the cherry blossoms in Kyoto. Like most Japanese cities, the ancient capital had been sadly disfigured by development, but the blossoms were still the object of pilgrimage for people from all over the country.

  To see the weeping cherry trees of the Heian Shrine was the highlight of Aunt Sumiko’s year, as it had been for seventy years. In the nature of things, she could not expect to see them many years longer, and Yukiko had set her heart on accompanying the old lady to Kyoto for one last time.

  Sumiko was bright with the happy anticipation of pleasures to come. ‘Ever since the Spring Festival I’ve been looking forward to it. They say the Gion cherries should be particularly fine this year.’

  Even as a child, Yukiko had never really understood what all the fuss was about. Why go all the way to Kyoto? There were cherries in Osaka; the suburbs were full of them. But no, nothing would suffice but that they should all get dolled up in their kimonos — Mother, Aunt Sumiko, her cousin Ema and herself — and catch the train to Kyoto.

  The routine had never varied. They would arrive in the evening, have a meal at a restaurant, go to see the Gion cherries the same day. Yukiko always liked that part of the outing best, the sprays of pink blossom even more beautiful in the lanterns’ golden light. To look down the avenues of trees, their arching branches thick with blossom, with everywhere the flickering light of lanterns, made Yukiko’s heart twist within her. By contrast, the visit to the Heian Shrine came as an anti climax, although the Heian cherry blossom was supposed to be the finest in Japan.

  Every year, without fail, Aunt Sumiko had told them that the blossoms had been finer when she was a girl. Even the lantern light had been richer and more golden, then.

  ‘One year my father decided to economise …’ This, too, was part of the ritual, a story that they heard every year. ‘Instead of going to Kyoto, he took us to the Brocade Bridge, but it wasn’t the same.’ She had laughed gleefully. ‘My mother gave him so much trouble that he never tried again. The next year we went back to Kyoto, and it has been Kyoto ever since.’

  Yukiko was uncomfortable in a kimono. In the restaurant her trailing sleeves got in the way of her chopsticks, making her drop pieces of food on the table. On one terrible occasion a prawn had ended up in the middle of the restaurant floor.

  The man at the next table, a great oaf, had seen what had happened and laughed. ‘Better get her a spoon and fork,’ he had shouted across to Sumiko.

  Yukiko would have fallen through a crack in the floor if she could have managed it; from her expression, Sumiko would have liked to jam man and niece into a sack and drown the pair of them.

  Now Sumiko looked dubiously at Yukiko’s western clothes. ‘You will wear a kimono when we go to Kyoto?’ she hoped.

  ‘Of course.’

  Heaven help me, Yukiko thought. But she had known that this, too, would be expected. It would be acceptable for a western woman to dress comfortably to see the cherries, but for a Japanese … Unthinkable.

  You are here for just over two weeks, she counselled herself, severely. Surely you can put up with it for such a little time? Yes, she could, but was thankful that she didn’t have to do it for six months. Whatever she may have told Craig, she cherished the traditions and culture of her homeland but there was no denying that a lot of extra baggage went with it. I couldn’t st
ay here forever, she thought. All this nonsense would drive me mad.

  Sumiko had dropped the subject of the cherry blossom, was now talking about life as she remembered it when she was young. ‘Your grandfather was such a handsome man in his uniform …’

  Yukiko knew from her expression that Sumiko was seeing, not her brother, but another pilot who had died in the closing stages of the war.

  She would have been in her early twenties when it happened, Yukiko thought. Younger than I am. Yet she had never married. What kind of love is it, she wondered, to continue almost sixty years after the object of the love is dead?

  She thought, I love Craig Warren. But already, since he went back to Australia, I see once again all the problems that we told ourselves we would overcome. Would I still care for him after fifty-five years, if I never saw him again? She would have liked to believe that, but could not. These days we live too fast for such things to be possible, she thought. We have time only to skate across the surface of life, while the deeper feelings escape us. She had not intended to tell Sumiko about the identification discs in her case, but now she changed her mind. The ritual of bringing home even this small part of what had been her grandfather could not be restricted to herself alone. In their way the discs symbolised everyone, military and civilian, who had died in that terrible war. Sumiko had lost her own love; she had the right to be involved in the discs’ return.

  She said, ‘There is something else I must do while I’m in Japan.’

  At Tokyo railway station, Yukiko and Sumiko were met by ex-Commander Shigemitsu, who had been one of Hideo’s senior officers at the end of the war. He must have been well into his eighties, Yukiko thought, but was still square and solid and hard. If he trod on your foot, you would know all about it.

  Sumiko had read about him in the papers; he had stayed in touch with the relatives of the men in his command who had been killed and each year arranged for a service to be held in their memory at the Yasukuni Shrine. After Yukiko had told Aunt Sumiko about the discs, they had agreed that Shigemitsu was the man to contact. Aunt Sumiko had phoned him; now they were here to hand over the discs in formal submission of Hideo’s memory to the spirits of his dead comrades.