by S. J. Parks
There were only three people in her train carriage, including an elderly woman, bowed to the inevitability of age and the dominance of a writhing grandchild. Hana wondered idly where his mother might be and what his father did. In a short time, paddy fields emerged, only to return as quickly to a rattling continuum of urban sprawl.
After she alighted, she made her way uphill as she had for Ukai’s memorial service, to the rarer air of the temple. Beyond the totem of the red torii gate, she bought a ticket at the temple kiosk. The serving acolyte had stepped straight out from a gold-leaf screen, depicting the Tale of Genji, the eleventh-century masterpiece she had seen in the museum at Ueno. Over stippled flecks of gold leaf beneath dream clouds, the heroine Murasaki wept in lover’s purple, with cascades of hair to dry her tears. Her ticket checked, Hana followed the unreliable path ranging across the grounds to look for the teahouse. She left the meanderings of the stepping-stone path and headed over a mossy bank of yellow-green. Finding herself blocked by a woven wooden fence she strode over it and almost stepped on a woman huddled on the ground in a cotton scarf, sweeping the bank of dead leaves with a dustpan and brush. Without admonishment, she sent her, with a wave of her brush, back to the path.
The trees stretched above cascading temple roofs, casting a purple shade. And she came across a party of tourists necklaced in serious cameras as they meandered past her at the head of the pond. To avoid them she headed uphill through bamboo caught behind thin woven frames of earlier growth. She failed to find any building fitting the description of the teahouse and beyond the open space of some utility buildings she exhausted her search and made for the red umbrellas of the open-air café selling matcha tea and pastel biscuits. She ordered with resignation and watched as the party of tourists arrived to join her.
‘Did you see the lake?’ a retired American man asked her; a party of garden enthusiasts from Boston, she guessed from his accent.
Too politely she tried to dissuade him from showing her the shots that he had taken on his image finder.
Too politely she let him share his enthusiasm for the first frame as his damp shirt touched her shoulder when he leaned over to show her. She could see it now in the small square of the digital image. There, by the water’s edge, was the round window of a small, terraced building standing over the lake.
‘The carp …’ he began.
Abruptly she left him and she left her tea, and she ran as if fleeing from a swarm of menacing tourists back to the lakeside.
Running her fingers across the rough, rendered surface of the wall, she walked round the sides of the small teahouse. It was the size of a single room; a peaceful place for contemplation alongside the frenetic castings of the world. On the lake beyond the maples the water plumed as a duck landed and she climbed the step to the terrace. She had arrived. It was Naomi’s building; she knew it was. A place of quiet contemplation, where she could almost hear the turning of the world, and, just now, possibly a little further than that. On the open platform that stood over the waters of the lake, beside her from a simple bamboo pipe; water fell gently into a small rough-hewn basin and she sat beneath a small, round window and wept.
Once back in Shimokitazawa, Hana left the station and made straight for Ziggy’s to find Miho. A rising fury that Miho had lied to her took her marching back to the café. Nothing else could quite account for her unease and now she had to find out why.
Miho was serving walnut coffee cake and greeted her with the assumption that she would take English tea.
‘How is Emiko right now?’ Miho asked, referring to the issues Jess had had with Emiko.
‘Miho, I went up to the temple,’ she pronounced. She was not prepared to let Miho off the hook, and would not be diverted from her mission.
‘Where Ukai had his memorial? At Guzeiji?’
‘Yes. And this time I had to pay to get in.’
‘You went to the memorial?’ Miho asked.
‘I did.’
‘Me too. But I didn’t see you there.’
Hana’s eyes narrowed.
Miho must sense her steely determination, had guessed she had some connection with Naomi?
‘I saw the teahouse,’ Hana said, watching a dam of history welling behind the older woman’s eyes.
Miho should know Naomi would have told her about the teahouse and her association with the project years earlier.
‘The teahouse. The teahouse by the lake?’
‘Is there more than one?’ Hana didn’t intend to let Miho toy with her.
‘No, I suppose not. Not in this case.’
‘So you know it?’ Hana waited for a response and watched Miho carefully.
Chapter 34
Tokyo, 1989
It was past two in the morning and Mochizuki knelt, accustomed to the humidity at a low table, in his yukata cotton robe. Beneath the only pool of light in the darkened room he poured over figures for the third stage of the Guam project. He fumbled for his cigarettes in the sleeve of his yukata. Beneath the desk light the clouds of exhaled smoke threw him into soft focus, and at this hour he looked like the loneliest man on earth. Ukai had been pushing a lot of work his way recently and the volume was getting too much. What concerned him slightly more was that at some stage soon there would be a payback, a time when Ukai would expect him to show his gratitude and he neither knew when it might be nor what form it would take. He did know that it was not necessarily going to be legal.
Across the silence a sleepy voice called him from another room.
‘Kun.’ There was a pause as she listened for his response and then she called him again. ‘Kun.’
He had returned from the Imperial Hotel where Kazuko had booked him to speak to a small crowd of mostly English and Americans. He was piqued that she had made the appointment, and when he returned home after the event she had gone to bed and he had made no special effort keep the noise down or the lights dimmed.
He gave no immediate reply but eventually the slap of the folder on the desk told her that he had finished for the night. Once in the bedroom he walked over to the window and pulled back the paper screen to circulate more air. The cloudy eastern sky was perma-bright, stale yellow, another nicotine summer night. Behind him the house was silent but for the beat of their retro fan.
In the darkness of the bedroom, he felt his way around their western bed, drawing back the light, silk summer cover. Kazuko lay awake now, propped up on the bed on one elbow.
‘You are working too hard. You ought to speak to Ukai,’ she told him. The length of their marriage was such that she knew him well enough to speak her mind. She spoke with clarity even now in the middle of the night. ‘You’ve known him how long? This association with Ukai has lasted so many years; you should feel free to express yourself. You should feel free to approach him and tell him enough is enough. Time for him to release you from that old burden of debt.’ Her voice was characteristically low and was becoming soporific.
He began to run his hands over his eyes. She was his counsel, his wife and his best friend, and while he knew she was right he was the only one who knew that his debt would never be released.
Chapter 35
Sam jumped out of the Roppongi taxi, handing his wallet to Miho, her silk now crumpled. They were outside the Ink Stick jazz club on the Sendagaya Road and Josh and Naomi had followed, drawn like magnets along a concrete façade to the punched-steel door, where a bouncer, claiming numbers, refused them entry. She had lost the contest to go home and reached in support for Josh’s arm as he stood with difficulty.
‘Bloody curly-haired yakuza.’ His alcohol-fuelled temper was immune to the small courtesies of his adopted country. As Josh started to lose it, the bouncer backed down and let them pass. Beneath a low-metal caged ceiling and clammy walls they joined the moving shadows, smoking and drinking away any absence of purpose.
‘Let’s go catch breakfast,’ Sam suggested after a while. ‘Tsukiji Market?’ He wanted sushi from the edge of the fish market where stalls so
ld fresh fish straight off the boat.
In the pale watery light of morning they made for Tsukiji on the Sumida River. At this time the catches of tuna and other fish would have been unloaded for auction at the dockside.
They arrived at Tsukiji subway station, as stale and dry-mouthed as long-distance travellers. Though the road was not entirely deserted they found no evidence of the river, a dockside, or a bustling market. A large basket flew past on a bicycle, close enough to collide with Josh’s meanderings. He shouted at the trader’s near miss and when Naomi declared she wanted the basket Josh ran after the man and accosted him. But he failed to be understood. They were flotsam to the trader.
Beside the red shrine stacked with enormous white sake barrels emblazoned in a Japanese script, a man was handing out packets of paper tissues from a box, advertising some new venture.
‘Are you sure we’ve got the right day, here?’ Sam turned to Miho.
Naomi was clinging to Josh’s arm, now tired and cold, though a warm July day dawned.
‘It’s okay,’ Miho said languidly. ‘It’s around here someplace.’
‘Shall we go home?’ Naomi tried Josh again, who responded by throwing his arm over her shoulder for his own need for support as much as hers.
‘You have to see the auctions first,’ Sam told her intently.
Sleepily Naomi leant her head against Josh as they walked, enjoying the silence after the enervating noise of their gilded crawl.
It was Sam’s night, and nobody contradicted him.
Their passage took them through a narrow lane of stores selling cooking utensils, of tiny shacks huddled together and crammed with pans, industrial sized steamers and bamboo mats for maki rolls; sieves and ladles hung like superstitions from the ceiling. In each there was room for the vendor and no one else. The closer they got to the centre of the market, the more alien it became.
They paused for a minute to watch the old bonito seller sitting at his makeshift wooden box, grinding the hard dry fish as the blade on his wheel worked it as if he was turning wood. Fine flakes of blossom pink fish caught on the air and fell gently, settling like a prophecy; the pile of shavings to be sold as garnish that melted in the mouth smelt of sweet wood smoke. The whirring of the blade finally set her teeth on edge and Naomi drew them towards the anemones and shellfish breathing through visceral tubes in livid seaweeds, beside mottled blue sea urchins with purple spines. She yelped for the others to share the horror of a livid green sea cucumber as it made a bid for freedom. The stall was a squirming mass, tickling her disgust. Every pouting shell, every lurid, creeping stick of flesh and every limpid sucker would find its way on to the tables of the Tokyo fish restaurants that day. For a moment she was less hungry than she might have been.
‘Is there any fish left in the fucking sea?’ Josh wailed.
The ground now was wet under foot as they moved through the market.
They were unaware that the man handing out papers at the subway had followed them and trailed them without urgency. On either side there were busy stalls dividing large carcasses of tuna or dolphin into chunks.
Sam felt it appropriate to share his knowledge. ‘Seven hundred and fifty-thousand metric tonnes of albacore, yellow fin, bluefin and western-Pacific skipjack caught in eighty-eight alone. Half the world’s entire catch.’
‘How much is left in the western Pacific?’ Naomi was wide-eyed.
She was interrupted by the acceleration of a cylindrical, one-man vehicle stacked with polystyrene boxes, beeping his way through the ice melt and adding to the din. The market began to resemble a factory. As the next one passed, Josh leapt on the back and feigned kisses to a presidential crowd waving his arms to entertain them, skipping back after a few metres before the driver had time to register his clowning passenger. Josh played chicken as another wave of vehicles passed until Miho pulled him behind a stall.
Naomi watched the razor teeth of a saw turn its way through the frozen carcass of a man-sized headless fish, drowning the shouts of the vendors. Eventually they reached the heart of the market where a crowd gathered at the dockside auctions; Sam and Josh were heads taller than anyone else. Unseen behind them was the slim man in the starched, blue jacket.
The serious business of bidding was in full swing. Traders in grey uniforms raised their hands to the frenzied patter of the auctioneer, their earnest faces hard with concentration. Wooden boxes, like coffins, containing enormous fish encircled them. And headless and tailless carcasses lay unceremoniously on the bare, concrete floor. Josh lay alongside one at the end of a line and he was shorter than the ridged torpedo by a good three feet. Naomi focused on the glistening brine under the bright-yellow unnatural light. Sam kicked him to get up and he rose with the juice of sea fish clinging to the back of his Savile Row dinner jacket .
They stood huddled together on the edge of the bidding crowd. Naomi cast a glance at Sam, who looked more pallid under the fluorescent lights. He was watching the game with genuine interest, quietly following the emerging bids from the traders as they followed the syncopated rhythm of the auctioneers; the catch was now a serious commodity. Josh had half an eye out for Sam as he watched with fascination. When he deemed it appropriate he hung on to Sam’s shirt at the elbow, instinctively aware that he was about to make a bid. Josh knew they would be lynched if they interfered with the day’s business.
‘Don’t.’ He glared at Sam. ‘You’ll get us all into trouble.’
Sam was too tired to put up a resistance and turned away, stepping aside from the auction babble.
When their attention flagged, Sam and Josh turned to move on, but they found Naomi and Miho were no longer standing behind them. They craned their necks around the edge of the crowd, looking over the heads of most of them, searching for the girls.
‘Where did they go?’ Sam entreated.
Chapter 36
Tsukiji, 1989
Josh and Sam were sobering up. Tsukiji Market seemed less of a playground to them than it had. They had been searching for the missing girls for a while.
‘You think they went home?’
They began to work their way back through the market, slowly, criss-crossing the route they had taken, covering their wake in broad bands. They retraced their tracks for a while and then returned to the site of the auction but neither girl was in sight.
Sam seemed less concerned. ‘They’ll be here somewhere. She’s with Miho,’ he said, as if the fact that one of them spoke Japanese was a comfort.
Josh pushed away from Sam. ‘Let’s split and meet back here in ten.’
Josh moved past the crowd of traders to the trucks and trailers beyond, finding his way between the refrigeration and ice-making units. A short distance from the crowd he looked inside the back of a huge articulated, cold storage vehicle. It had doors that would secure a small fortress but for the moment they were unbolted and hung wide open. The cavernous bastion already breached and the stuff gone. The engine was running and awaiting the fish load; it was about to depart. He peered into the depths of the refrigeration trailer and felt more than just a physical chill, far from reassured at finding nothing. Without a soul around, the whole area was eerily empty after the throbbing activity of the market. Across the street four men, as dark as their clothes, were separating rubbish into containers. Losing sight of indulgent, nocturnal Tokyo, he felt himself waking to the threatening potential of a dockside city, and then heard Sam calling for Naomi. One of the men interrupted his work, raising his head to the foreigners, pendulous entrails dangling from his hands. Josh carefully picked his way over the pools of water and black hoses snaking their way to feed the parked lorries and vans. Back in the centre he was strafed by piles of boxes staggering towards him and the immediacy of small, delivery vehicles. The deep-throated voices of the generators drowned all other noise.
‘Shit!’ He jumped back, retreating to shelter behind the open door of a trailer, when a small forklift nearly ran him down. Since he had been up all night, a slight paranoia
crept over him and he became convinced that the driver had aimed for him. He felt vulnerable and isolated and decided he needed to get back to Sam. He made his way quickly back to the auction where he found him vacantly picking his teeth.
‘Seen them?’
Sam shook his head and Josh sagged in an articulated weariness. He had his hands in his pockets when somebody pushed him from behind, his tired body overreacting. He swung round aggressively.
The girls stood smiling beside him. Sam squeezed Miho’s buttock with a dawning grin on his face.
Naomi could see Josh’s anger flare. But at her innocent smile the shadow began to lift in relief at seeing her as if warmed by the daylight. When Josh had had left off scowling, Naomi presented Sam with a package.
‘This,’ she said proudly, offering him a paper-wrapped package, ‘is your birthday present.’
Josh was further annoyed that Naomi looked so pleased with herself. The spotlight of the night rested solely on Sam.
Sleepily Sam took the present. ‘It was yesterday,’ he complained.
Naomi began to object to their unenthusiastic reception. ‘Do you deserve it?’ she tested him. ‘Open it when we have breakfast.’
‘It smells,’ he said second-guessing.
‘You know it doesn’t smell,’ Miho cautioned him patiently.
There was a remarkable absence of the smell of fish. It was all too fresh. Naomi leaned close to Sam’s ear and imparted confidentially, in a sing-song Chinese accent, ‘Old Chinese saying: fish and the company of friends smell after three days.’
‘That’s guests,’ he countered.
‘Today friends,’ she laughed.