by S. J. Parks
Chapter 48
‘Come, come with me.
Indulge my friendship,
Sleeping butterfly’
Poet Bashō, seventeenth century
Tokyo, 1989
Naomi and Mochizuki had spent the morning sizing up the teahouse at the temple.
‘Hungry?’ he asked.
Naomi followed him up an incline towards the temple restaurant selling ramen and soba to visitors, a place busy only on festival days and weekends. Perched on the hillside, the ground behind it fell sharply away, covered in a tumbling mass of dense, lush undergrowth and sapling trees. It was nothing more than a rudimentary shack with the bare essentials for cooking and they found they were alone.
Mochizuki had got his feet wet surveying the teahouse, stepping back to assess the elevation overlooking the pond. He took his shoes off and straddled one of several benches covered in red, felt cloth and shaded by a large, red, paper umbrella. She sat at the end of the bench in a demur side-saddle.
‘You’re looking hot, Naomi-san,’ Mochizuki observed with mock formality, languorously stroking sweat from his neck with a firm hand as he looked up towards the brolly. ‘You will spend more summers in Japan. You will get used to this,’ he said exhaling deeply.
The nonchalance with which he predicted her future and teased her was amusing.
‘Well, what are the guarantees?’ she toyed.
‘You begin to fall in love already,’ he continued playfully.
Naomi stopped the game abruptly, finding herself covered in gentle embarrassment.
‘It’s a wonderful culture.’ He looked at her slowly, searching to see if she had or had not misunderstood him.
Finally the old waitress, Mompei ducked under the short noren curtain; it blew in her face and her tray clipped the wall.
‘Dame!’ she swore, making her way over to them. Two complimentary glasses, half full of water, stood in a pool.
She greeted them, wiping her hands on her besmirched apron. She had hefty wrists, all the better for lifting vast batches of buckwheat noodles on holy days. Naomi remained outside their exchange.
‘Irrashaimase.’ She uttered her welcome formulaically with the menu cards ‘Going barefoot now, is it , Mochizuki?’ she gabbled in Japanese.
‘You walking home?’ she goaded him. ‘Or to the love hotel at the bottom of the Yokohama Road?’ He returned an explosive snort; they were familiar and these were the easy terms of their playful banter.
Naomi hadn’t a clue what they were saying as they sparred. She did understand love hotel, though the subjects were unclear. Then Mompei nodded towards her.
‘If there were teeth left in your head to remove after that suggestion, I’d do it for you,’ Mochizuki said, laughing.
In answer to Naomi’s quizzical look, he explained, clearing his throat and searching for gravity. ‘This woman suggests we build a hotel.’
Naomi knew she had not said this. She had heard love hotel, and Mompei’s nod towards her had particularly infuriated him and then made him laugh. What was this ridiculous conversation he was having?
‘Is she okay? Can you translate the menu for me?’
He ran down the menu muttering, ‘Tsukiji. Kitsune. Oyako. Oyako-donburi.’ His tongue searched his front teeth in anticipation.
‘Okay, Moth-eaten, what’s it to be?’ the waitress asked Mochizuki. ‘The parent and child?’ She nodded towards Naomi.
Naomi thought he looked for a moment genuinely infuriated.
‘Eta. Etahin.’ He chose very specifically to call her an untouchable.
The woman placed her fists on her waist defiantly. Naomi couldn’t work out the reason for the altercation.
‘You couldn’t lick your fingers to a good meal. As for cooking one …’ Mompei drew her mouth into a long point until it resembled the crinkled end of an ill-sharpened pencil.
The damp air was soon heavy with the smell of cooking as they talked over the structural supports for the water-based section of the teahouse. The waitress returned supporting a four-storey pagoda of soups and noodles, and laid them across the red felt bench. Taking up her chopsticks, Mompei caught the wayward strands, teasing them into place. She then produced a canister covered in cherry-blossom washi paper and from it generously scattered ribbons of dried inky seaweed, a few on each meal, for nutritional balance and decoration.
Naomi removed her chopsticks from their paper sleeve, joined at one end like Siamese twins. She broke them apart easily and began rubbing the splintered edges against one another to remove the shards of rough wood.
Mochizuki leapt up like a man possessed, holding her wrists to stop her. He seemed to regain his composure as soon as he had lost it.
‘This we never do. It is a bad omen to rub the chopsticks together. You know you must never do this, Naomi-chan,’ using her name to soften the rebuke. ‘Only at a funeral can we use them this way.’
Naomi apologized but still felt his touch on her wrists.
‘There it is.’ He pointed to a large, golden egg yolk floating in a pool of broth. ‘The reflection of the moon on the water.’
‘Quite a poetic lunch.’ Naomi chose irony though he didn’t respond.
‘Not entirely accurate.’ He began slurping his noodles hungrily and quite knowingly and mindful of her reaction said, ‘You should take more air with the noodles, Naomi-chan,’ comfortable now with the diminutive address he used for her.
‘Some noise,’ she added before attempting to follow his drain-clearing lead. He smiled at her open criticism and broke into laughter over her attempts.
When Mochizuki had finished his noodles he balanced his chopsticks across his bowl. Elbows on his knees, legs wide apart, contemplating the dirt floor, he found an old pine cone, split and dried. He picked it up and threw it hard, aiming at a tree across the track. It shattered against the trunk, casting dry seeds and broken integuments under the tree.
‘I have sown the seeds of a new pine tree. I have something I will show you. A little box with an ivory in just the shape of the cone.’ He looked at her searchingly. ‘I love this place.’ And into the silence he added, ‘You know the poet Bashō?’
‘No, I don’t,’ she owned.
‘He created the first-ever haiku verses. They are like a snapshot in time and it is here, in this place, that I remember him most.’ The colour rose in her cheeks, he noticed, or was it the reflection from the red brolly?
The atmosphere was still and the trees hardly moved in the pulsating heat.
And now he chooses to talk to me of poetry? she thought.
Chapter 49
Tokyo, 1989
‘A problem for architecture, the truest form of art, which has not been a genuine concern for other artists, lies in where to plant the species in the city garden of structures, and where to plant the specimen that, ipso facto, covers land, where once stood ancient woodlands.’
Naomi had been given the task of reading the translator’s proofs for a publication covering a retrospective of Mochizuki’s works. It did not come naturally to her. There were compensations in getting to know what he stood for and believed in, and, in reading his words, she came closer to falling under his influence. He had been absent that morning and she asked around after him. That day he had suggested they would have an office picnic on the beach but he had not appeared all morning.
Saito-san was keen to maintain her reputation as the ears of the office and came over with the feigned purpose of borrowing a highlighter to find out what Naomi was asking of the others.
‘Is Mochizuki in?’ Naomi asked again.
‘Probably with Ukai. The only man he answers to,’ Saito-san told Naomi flatly, and she scurried off as if she had already said too much. She was keen not to be drawn into further revelations.
Naomi had heard the name but knew nothing of the man.
She turned three more pages of copy before she found, tucked between the loose leaves, a portion of thinly lined file paper and on it a note, hastily writ
ten in biro. Someone had drawn lashes round the vacant spaces of the punched holes in the cheap grey paper. The first few lines were in in Japanese kanji and below was presumably a translation; the postscript read: Bashō, seventeenth century.
Come, come with me.
Indulge my friendship,
Sleeping butterfly.
Kobe was engrossed in his comic book, so she ruled him out as the perpetrator of a prank. Nobody, it seemed, was looking for her reaction to the note. So she took it to be an ode to the season from Mochizuki because he had been at pains to introduce her to the poet Bashō.
Iwata was busy making runs in the jeep to deliver the larger items and the chairs to the beach, and had concluded his trips by ten. A delivery van arrived with the food and Saito-san spend a good part of the rest of morning in the kitchenette. Naomi found her with the furoshiki, wrapping cloths that had been bought for the purpose, wrapping the picnic bento boxes with large ties for handles.
‘You need a hand?’
Saito-san told her that Mochizuki had rung in and would be late for the picnic but would join everyone later on the beach.
So she would see him today, she thought.
Iwata looked pinched and resentful.
The sea was so far out across the volcanic sands that the line of water could have been a heat haze. Naomi stood on the low sea wall with her back to Mount Fuji looking way out across the volcanic black beach to the Pacific Ocean. It was difficult to believe any tidal force could cover the distance and rise like Hiroshige’s blue wave in the woodblock print and threaten the town.
Even here, on the margins of the sea, humidity clung to the beach party – to their clothes and their hair – adding to their heavy expectancy. Mochizuki had still to arrive and it wasn’t until he did so that Saito-san would start the picnic. There was a mutual assumption that Naomi would only work in the office for a short time and so their efforts to assimilate her were half-hearted at best. Outside the job of work they opened broken conversations with her but, without a common currency, floundered beyond any subject, other than what the bento boxes would contain.
It seemed to Naomi like a long time before Mochizuki strode over the sea wall towards them and, as with a new breeze, their spirits lifted. Frankly, everyone was relieved to see him, not least since the picnic was his idea.
He marched straight over to Naomi and sat beside her. Saito-san handed the bento boxes round and he ate like a prince among his tribe. No one was in any doubt that Naomi was his sometime-honoured guest. She fell on the plum-blossom carrots. Observing this, Mochizuki loaded his own share onto her plate.
Iwata, she could see, did not approve of the additions to her picnic.
‘I was once given a necklace of carrots,’ she told Mochizuki. ‘Unpeeled with their tops intact. There were nine, laced on blue nylon string, lying in a box wrapped in beautiful paper. A nine-carrot necklace, like the gold.’
He laughed appreciatively.
She felt him touch the loose hair across her back.
Quietly he asked her, ‘You get my poem?’, his warm breath close to her ear.
She blushed at his intimacy, letting loose the gingered chicken from her chopsticks.
He took a virtual step back, aware that he had frightened her.
‘Bashō, our great poet of nature,’ he said loudly. ‘I like him more than you like bento lunch.’
He got up to leave her, casting a suggestion behind him. ‘You’ll come and give me a hand at the publishers in Nagoya? I have to travel to Gifu. You’ll come?’ And before she had a chance to answer he left her to think about it. ‘I must attend to my staffs.’
He ran off to retrieve a baseball glove from the basket, calling in Iwata’s direction to grab the bat, ‘Oi Chinko.’ He called him playfully.
‘Chinko?’ Hana queried, as Saito-san came over to provide more tea. She giggled behind her white lace-trimmed handkerchief. She pointed between her legs and then looked towards Iwata’s crotch. She walked off with the flask laughing. Out on the sands the men ran to the bases they had laid out from their low-slung beach stools. Naomi dozed as Mochizuki’s infectious laughter crossed the sand.
Chapter 50
Josh had excelled himself and had lit the coals on a Weber BBQ they had bought at the weekend in store, at Tokyu Hands. He stepped in from the terrace with more meat.
‘I may have a business trip.’ Naomi tried the idea for sound. She was nibbling a crisp. The BBQ was covering the struggling potted tree they had bought, in acrid smoke.
‘A business trip?’ He treated her job as a joke.
‘Yes, middle of next month.’
‘But that’s exactly when we planned to go out to the country.’ They were always planning a tour and it was often postponed in favour of his own business agenda. The timing was inconvenient for him. ‘There’s no money in it. So when are you giving this in?’
She followed through. ‘Yes, Mochizuki has asked if I will review the proofs for the retrospective and the publishers are down in Nagoya. It’ll take a couple of days.’
Josh snorted. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t think you should go.’
She decided to leave it until she found him in a more amenable mood.
Chapter 51
The crane. A symbol of longevity, immortality youth, and good fortune
Outside the office window the young fruit on the satsuma tree was ripening; weathered blossom still hung in clusters, destined to remain barren, lagging behind their season. All that morning Naomi had been checking the faint outlines of generations of copies against the original draft plans. Mochizuki had widened her brief. Watanabe and Takeshi were silently engrossed in their screens. Watanabe had retreated to one of the angled desks at the back of the room. The phones were silent and the whole office worked to the tune of the air-conditioning units. They could all bear witness to what was an unprecedented row that broke the calm of the morning.
Mochizuki had reappeared after coffee and was sitting at his desk behind his copy of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. The headlines that day called again for the imminent resignation of yet another member of the ruling party caught up in a corruption scandal. Mochizuki’s interests, however, lay in the back pages where he checked the latest baseball results. Naomi resumed her tired comparisons of the grey sheets of instructions.
Mochizuki finally swopped the baseball scores for the figures on the Guam project on the desk in front of him. Iwata was heading towards Saito-san’s office in the other room and had almost fallen over Takeshita’s prominent feet protruding from beneath his desk and he responded by giving them a friendly kick. Mochizuki stopped Iwata on his way past and stipulated quite curtly that he, Mochizuki must see the elevations for the Guam hotel before they were sent to Shinoda construction. Iwata seemed surprised that he should have to get approval for the documents before sending them and drew the plans from the chest near accountant’s office. He threw them on his desk for Mochizuki’s approval.
Mochizuki looked briefly and handed them back. He dismissed them summarily and let him know that he wanted Iwata to send the earlier draft. He earnestly stroked the stubble on his chin.
‘No, we have a later draft for construction,’ Iwata contradicted him.
Mochizuki’s casual ease evaporated and he demanded to see both the earlier and the later draft. Iwata agreed, assuming that, with two copies on the table, he could support his case. When he returned he placed the cover sheet for the two sets of plans beside one another.
‘Send the earlier one,’ Mochizuki confirmed.
‘I can’t send the old plans for construction,’ Iwata countered, ‘they are incorrect.’ His voice becoming plangent. At this mounting insurrection Mochizuki ran his fingers through his hair to control his agitation, and then yelled at Iwata at point-blank range
‘I’m telling you, send them!’
Stunned, Iwata retreated with the conflicting plans. Watanabe and Takeshita exchanged glances,
waiting for the next act. Mochizuki rifled round in his pockets for a packet of cigarettes, then clasped one between his teeth; the paper clung to his wet lip while he frisked himself for his matches. Takeshita was quickly out of his seat, fumbling for his lighter till he leant over Mochizuki’s desk with a light. A sense of unnatural ease, like the first drag of nicotine, descended over the office.
Later that morning Naomi sought out Saito-san.
‘What was that about?’
Saito-san took pleasure in translating a nugget of some importance. ‘He will get Iwata to send the construction QS the early version. Not the latest approved and signed,’ she said, with eyes as large as the implications. Different Specs. Different costs.
With that gift imparted she turned on her heel importantly and went back to her office.
Towards the end of the morning, having fielded a couple of calls from the aggressive Mr Wang from the IT company, Naomi was composing a fax to send in reply to a query on Italian furniture imports.
Unnoticed until he was standing over her Mochizuki asked, ‘You want lunch?’
Josh would be working late that night and the invite made her feel suddenly less of an exile.
‘Yes. Five or ten minutes. Okay?’
‘You can leave it,’ he said. ‘My wife is expecting us for lunch.’ And the invite became a demand.
And yet again she’d been singled out from the other staff. It was, she thought, quite an honour. She was keen to meet her. His wife would, he had said, be there.
She invariably ate alone; she would stay at her desk, or more often than not she would head to the beach because it gave her a thrill to sit in view of Mt Fuji. Today, finally, she would meet Mrs Mochizuki. Miho had told her a little about her.
They left together, passing the punched-aluminum gates stifled by kiwi vines, and walked three blocks. Only a small dog crossed the hot tarmac, pausing midway to scratch. There was no smell of the sea, just a dry dust on the wind.
‘Can I buy you a drink?’ he asked, as they passed the vending machines.