Made in Japan

by S. J. Parks

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ she said to the darkness.

  They watched until the fishing was over and the birds were bundled into open weave baskets, like lobster pots, to be transported back and fed.

  Back on the shore Mochizuki tipped the oarsman who slid away in the darkness as quietly as he had appeared. When they passed the boat hut, Naomi glimpsed the belted boatman and young girl, his face buried in her neck, one leg thrust between hers.

  In the lobby Mochizuki left her to go up to the room.

  ‘I’m going to order dinner,’ he called back when he was halfway down the corridor, as if it were an afterthought.

  In the room Naomi wrote her diary and then changed into a yukata for the night, she opened the shoji screens to the small balcony and the river scene below. Points of light below were lost in the darkness, as the night had fallen. There were no stars. It was, she felt, as if the sky was inverted.

  Chapter 60

  A low table near the window in their room was set with small, black, lacquered trays and hand-painted dishes. He returned wearing the complimentary yukata, flushed with the heat, his wet grizzled hair standing on end; towel in hand, he rubbed vigorously, drying it upwards from the back of his neck.

  ‘Time for a cigar?’

  She didn’t bother to answer but drank her beer.

  He smiled, ‘So you ordered Asahi Super Dry. Good,’ he said as he bent to pour himself a glass. ‘You want to toast to us?’ He raised his glass as he stood.

  Still turned away, lifting her glass half-heartedly; she remained contained and private. ‘To your retrospective,’ she said.

  ‘It’s pretty ne,’ he said, coming closer to join her at the window. ‘They have put lights on the castle.’ He waved his glass in the direction of the hillside where the illuminated curling eaves of the castle stood against the dark. ‘Silver Mountain is behind the castle.’

  She smiled, acknowledging its charm.

  And then, as if he purposefully wanted to break the charm of the moment offered by the lights and the castle against the hills, he said, ‘It’s a youth hostel. Made of concrete.’ He looked down at her and grinned.

  The door to the room slid open, and in stepped a serving woman.

  ‘Haiiii … Gohan wa ikaga desu ka.’

  From a textured, red, lacquer box she served rice with a bamboo paddle. Naomi sat demurely, Japanese-style, her knees folded beneath her, with the yukata crossed tightly over her legs. He sat directly opposite, in a matching robe. And they looked like a pair of Hinamatsuri dolls.

  Muttering quietly in a strong dialect, the woman poured warm sake from an earthenware flask.

  As Naomi raised the thimble-sized sake cup to her lips, she felt him lay his eyes on her. Her breath stirred the vapour, which rose so that she could anticipate the pleasure before the warm sake hit her tongue. He took up his chopsticks and started to eat. From under his brows his glances were furtive. They were silent until the woman left them.

  ‘Yama. Umi. Yama. Umi.’ He pointed with his chopsticks to a dish of thinly sliced octopus and shitake mushrooms layered and lying fanned out on heavy dish; the red skin of the octopus as if it were trimmed with coloured lace. He had finished speaking before she had registered what he said.

  ‘What’s that’?

  ‘Yama. Umi. Yama. Umi,’ he repeated.

  ‘It is something from the mountains. Something from the sea.’

  ‘Kaiseki ryori … Zen-style cooking,’ he explained.

  ‘You bring me more poetry?’ she purred. ‘Delicious.’ She picked at a baby-pink stalk of crunchy ginger, pickled in rice vinegar.

  A flower floated in her miso soup. ‘Too beautiful to eat,’ she continued.

  He hung on her words.

  ‘So fresh,’ she said, as she pushed her chopsticks into the flesh of a small black-and-gold fish, skewered and cooked as if still writhing. He drank in her excitement as it danced its way across the various offerings.

  ‘You don’t eat it in the correct order,’ he admonished.

  ‘To hell with the order.’ She laughed and drank more sake; cooler now and less sweet.

  ‘Shall we get more?’ She toyed with her cup.

  ‘We got a drinks chiller in the hall.’

  Naomi got up to get him a beer. She came back, brushing past him carelessly.

  ‘How long to get through the contents of the fridge?’

  ‘I have to open it with my teeth?’ he jested in complaint.

  Obligingly she returned with an open bottle. He poured it from a height and the suds of froth touched his upper lip as he drank. Naomi eyed his enjoyment. He glanced at her along the side of his glass.

  Her yukata was large, tied loosely at the waist. It had fallen from her knees and it lay open so that he could see the soft skin on the inside of her thigh and she stared at him purposefully until her legs fell open in invitation. Breathing strongly he rose to move towards her.

  ‘Haiii …’ Out in the hall the waitress announced her arrival. When she entered Mochizuki was standing at the window. The woman put down a tray of sake and began lighting the burners under the raw meat. She prattled on to herself, asking how the meal was going, was it to their liking? As she shut the fusama doors she said she hoped that they enjoyed the meat, enunciating the word flesh.

  Mochizuki crossed the tatami in bare feet and pulled at the light. He lay like a shogun on the zabuton, leaning on one elbow. It was dark but for the light of the candle burners and he looked at her with open hunger now.

  ‘You know what there is between you and me,’ he said softly. He held his fingers up to demonstrate, his thumb and forefinger a millimetre apart. ‘It’s not much.’ Their heads were close and his voice was low. He bent to kiss her lightly on the side of the neck. Her stretched palm ran up the back of his neck and held him there.

  ‘This much.’ He pulled at the lapel of her yukata robe, tugging it away. Slowly his tongue found her nipple and, wet with saliva, teased it hard. She thought fleetingly of protection and the thought passed.

  Her fingers closed and she pulled him by his hair down on top of her. His hand caught the weight of her breast and his thumb played with her nipple, pulsing her sensitized flesh.

  Her legs were still caught up high and open. His tongue trailed down past her belly button and on to explore her. He felt her with his tongue until she was tense and waiting for him. Her outstretched arms caught him up and pulled him roughly, lifting him until she could reach his thigh and drive her hand down to guide him into her. He moved slowly inside her and the tension for her was emotionally unprotected. Towards the end she was quieter and came first, haltingly, stroking the muscles on his wet back as she waited for him. Their heads lay close. She listened to his breathing.

  ‘Nothing between us,’ he breathed.

  She laughed. The light in the burners had died out and it was pitch black in the room, the window slightly open. The town was silent, the cormorant fishers gone home, but the sound of the river drifted up to them like white noise.

  The next morning she found him with his back to her, standing at the shoji window in the white daylight, looking down on the town. Behind him she pulled at his yukata sleeve with the intention of planting a grateful lover’s kiss on the bone of his shoulder. Brushing her lips against his skin and resting her head on his back she was caught in surprise. The blank light of day revealed the tattoo of a bird stamped low on his right shoulder blade. It was as welcome as a cautionary tale. For a moment it seemed she didn’t know him but as he turned his face was reassuringly familiar.

  ‘I had it from a long time ago.’

  ‘It looks like a cormorant.’

  ‘It is a cormorant,’ was all he said.

  Chapter 61

  Ed’s apartment, 2012

  Yumi, the office PA, had arrived at Ed’s apartment early, clutching a bag of her own cutlery. He had called her to say he was short. She had dressed early for the occasion and with the help of dyes, paints and depilatories, she held ont
o some appearance of youth. Though she often imagined otherwise, Ed was destined to be no more significant in her life than the pillow bear sitting guard on her floral duvet. She would do anything for him.

  Ed was unstinting in his verbal thanks. Yumi stood in her flat shoes, devotedly polishing the glasses, which were the only items he had in long supply. He crisscrossed the apartment, altering the temperature dial, turning the lighting low and changing his choice of music twice. They had all accepted his invitation, including the visiting younger cousin Roddy and he had had to ask the teacher.

  On the door chime, Ed left Yumi opening the wine to greet the piano teacher. His hand went inadvertently to the familiar small of her back as he planted a polite kiss. Inconveniently he recalled her arched naked beneath him and took refuge in the elegance of assumed manners. It was only a few times and it had escalated without him meaning it to. Why had he given her a key? He had no experience in how to reverse out of what he had started. He knew he was, by nature, useless socially. He could justifiably wrap it up. It had been a bit of fun for both of them. She wouldn’t mind – they only slept together a few times. It was over, he concluded. As of now, right this minute. At the door chime he broke loose as a few more arrived along with Hana and her American friend.

  Hana’s mood had lifted as the elevator rose towards the forty-first floor. On the way, by the prospect of the dinner, Jess told her she had booked a flight out. The lift was a good place to shout had they needed to. Jess said she wanted to get back to where she could make a difference, to where she was needed. Was there any genuine evidence of this in Tokyo? she’d said. She tugged at her so often on a wind change she could no longer keep up with her. The big news was almost an anticlimax. Of course she would miss her.

  Hana stepped into the apartment where the city lay at her feet, beyond an expanse of glass. It was, at first sight, a paradigm of desire, though slightly intimidating.

  ‘The air is thinner up here?’ She smiled and complimented.

  She surveyed the furnishings and assumed Ed’s borrowed style was a reflection of his wealth; if you happened to like the five-star lobby look, and while she did not, she was not immune to the effect. Ed made every effort to put them at ease, welcoming them with a real go at a charm offensive.

  ‘Good to see you. It’s been too long. Shame you couldn’t come when Jess came with us to Tsukiji.’ Any easiness on his part was assumed.

  Jess went to Tsukiji? She looked at Jess for confirmation that she had lied, but got nothing. Jess started pressing Ed about the plans to move the market to the other side of town and so she left her to it; she would cool down for a moment.

  Hana found herself alone on the runway sofa as the city lights paintballed the sky. Jess had Ed collared. Roddy ambled over, choosing to sit uncomfortably on the floor, his back against the chair base beside her. Regarding him with no small degree of resignation, because he seemed a little isolated, she leaned over to befriend him. He was here to finish his Oxford dissertation. She felt obliged to begin with a question on his area of study whether she wanted it answered or not.

  ‘It’s on the “Eta” peoples of Japan.’

  Her mind wandered to who it was she’d been living with all this time and whether she knew Jess at all.

  ‘Eta?’

  ‘Like Indian low caste. They have been at the bottom of the ladder. Ghettoized for centuries. These village people are stuck as an underclass. Pressed into all the dirty jobs.’

  Of course Jess had been at the Tsukiji fish market and missed Ukai’s memorial when she had specifically asked her to support her and be there.

  Roddy pushed up his ample glasses. ‘This immobility has voided the need for an immigration policy.’

  She nodded politely.

  ‘The system was perpetuated by municipal records, which, of course, are categorized quite comprehensively.’

  Hana would beg to differ but it was easier to drift off and let him ramble on than engage with him.

  She liked Ed herself, and Jess had turned it in to some sort of competition.

  ‘The data on family history has been freely available to business corporations.’

  ‘Readily available?’ She was drawn into listening to him despite herself.

  ‘Companies have made background checks to ensure they avoided hiring the wrong type of individuals.’

  ‘I have been looking for someone.’

  He met her admission with interest.

  ‘I spent a day at the records office looking for someone.’

  ‘And what did you find?’

  ‘Nothing – a completely fruitless task.’

  He shuffled nervously in his uncomfortable seat and looked grave.

  ‘That could blow quite a hole in my theories.’

  ‘I asked the consulate. I searched online. I went to the municiple offices,’ she explained, finding at last someone who would listen to the catalogue of her searches.

  ‘On the other hand the census of people here in Japan is quite baffling.’ Again he pushed his glasses up the reddened bridge of his nose.

  A loud laugh. Jess was across the room, elbow on the seat back beside Ed, no distance between them; she had locked him in conversation.

  ‘I was looking for a man,’ and for the first time she said it, ‘my father. Possibly.’

  He laughed undiplomatically at her uncertainty.

  She shouldn’t mind. He was younger than her, still a student.

  ‘She wasn’t married, you see.’

  He nodded, serious beyond his years. ‘Like Eta, unmarried mothers were treated with the same clerical hand of discrimination.’

  ‘Is that true?’ She thought of Naomi and the man beyond the records. It seemed tonight she should give up on the labyrinthine data that would tell her nothing very much at all.

  ‘Remember the sarin gas attack in ninety-five?’

  She did not.

  ‘Incident on the Tokyo Metro.’

  The boy knew so much, she thought.

  ‘It had,’ he said, ‘been perpetrated by a terrorist group headed up by the self-proclaimed prophet Asahara who was himself a member of these Eta people. At the time Asahara had predicted that Armageddon was timetabled for nineteen ninety-seven.’

  ‘Are we still waiting for it? she asked

  ‘You can wait if you want to spend life worrying about the future.’ He scrambled up. Another drink?

  In fact, she worried more about the past.

  ‘Well,’ he drawled on, ‘you could say he was years out and then the nuclear power plant in Fukushima province blew.’

  Hana saw the vernissage of a tanker on the shards of a civilization.

  ‘That nearly took us all out. Maybe the east are the pariahs of the west. We left them to clean up the mess.’

  A huge tanker washed back ashore.

  ‘And we are still waiting for the big earthquake; I guess that’ll finally do it,’ he said confidently.

  Hana had become used to suppressing her fear of this and had resorted to ignoring the jolts of pressure release, roughly in fortnightly bursts, she had experienced. She preferred to stick her head in the sand and ignore the huge mammal in any Japanese room, occasionally responsible for knocking pots off the shelves and stamping so violently across the floorboards that the walls would shake and roof tiles would fall at its contained vehemence. Most days it slept and kept its trunk out of the way so that nobody need trip on it and rile it.

  Chapter 62

  Hana couldn’t take in any more and left Roddy with his cousin and found Jess wearing so many necklaces she’d leave a tribe bereft, applying more wine to her evening. Feeling confrontational despite the company she challenged her.

  ‘You went without me but you said you hadn’t.’

  ‘Well …’ Jess was vague.

  ‘We had agreed we would go to that memorial together. Can I trust you at all?’

  ‘You were …’ she began accusatively. ‘That …’

  Hana rounded on her ‘…
was a lie.’

  And as she walked away, excuses followed.

  ‘Just leave it, Jess’ Hana said dismissively, walking in Ed’s direction.

  Hana watched him assume a smile that was a little too bright. She scanned for a visual clue to stock her conversational armoury before he reached her. The first to hand was the painting behind him. She did not like the Futurists and the work was a small step from comic book: an explosion of geometrics in primaries. That was all it said to her, broken shards of emulsified colour.

  ‘Your painting …’ she began, returning his smile.

  ‘I am glad you like it.’ He ended her sentence in a rash of nerves as welcome as hives.

  ‘Very machismo,’ she conceded. Giving it a moment’s hesitation. ‘I only like it in context.’ And then, for fear of launching into another academic subject that evening, she corrected herself. ‘I don’t actually find it …’ And she bottled out before she could tell him she really didn’t like it.

  ‘Yumi found it. The sofa, the dining table, the …’ It was as if he wanted to own up: nothing was his. This wasn’t him; he was indebted to others for the sophistication.

  He was phrasing another question on art when she asked, ‘Ever homesick?’

  Ed, as a Londoner, had seen what she had seen, and like a giant, mental, camera obscura, they could each project places in Brixton, in Stockwell, Hackney, and share them like they were walking together in the same conversational landscape. A joint pleasure.

  It got late and the evening’s energy ebbed around them while they sat together conspiratorially. He was guilty of ignoring the others until her field of vision became the black skirt of the piano teacher, who had up to that point kept her distance. She was about to leave and rejected Ed’s weak protest. Yumi might share a taxi? he offered eventually.

  She would wait it seemed. As she sank onto the vast sofa, thighs so close to him that they touched Hana wondered what their relationship was … Prising himself from the small space between them, he went to arrange a cab. Yumi, a little giggly and inebriated, offered her a dry sembei pretzel, making out it was some sort of consolation.