Made in Japan

by S. J. Parks

  Chapter 68

  That evening the audience filtered out of the early-evening showing at the Picture House at a languid pace. Miho took Naomi’s elbow and drew her from colliding with yet another would-be critic, replaying the departure scene, neither in the movie or really outside the cinema about to have a meal.

  ‘Sam is leaving Japan,’ Miho said, breaking the news to her.

  Josh had warned Naomi this might be on the cards and she had since assumed she would lose her good friend to the States.

  ‘What will you do, Miho?’

  ‘Follow him once he gets settled, but for now I have to stay.’

  ‘You’ll miss him.’

  ‘I will follow like you will follow.’

  Naomi ignored her. What exactly did she mean?

  ‘Why has he got to go?’ Naomi asked.

  ‘He doesn’t want to talk about it but he has backed some of the wrong clients,’ Miho leaned in and whispered. ‘It has to do with Guam. And that yakuza, Ukai, who Mochizuki works for.’

  Naomi’s secret remained and she had not confided in Miho. Her many reasons counselled against it. This was all she needed to hear. She decided not to rise to the barb, choosing instead to ignore it.

  Miho persisted. ‘The airport deal in Guam is a big scandal brewing and Sam has got to make himself scarce. I don’t know how involved Mochizuki is but he is good friends with the guy Ukai, who is right in the middle of it.’

  ‘Friends with Ukai?’ She knew the owner of the construction company was regarded as shady. Mochizuki had alluded to favours but how much she did know about her architect?

  After he left his training session at the gym, Josh went running and on his last leg he slowed to a walking pace to bring his heart rate down. As he passed the pachinko parlour gaming hall in the high street, he regretted that he had to go home that evening to the strain of living like strangers with Naomi.

  He walked into the house, still sweating kicked off his running shoes and headed for the shower. He had decided they should go away, take the holiday he had long been promising. He couldn’t ask her to marry him right now, but if they took a break, maybe he could turn it around. They could begin again. He would broach it with her now.

  When he found that the house was empty, if he were honest he found a part of him was thankful. Maybe he wasn’t ready to patch it up; he had too much on at work to think about and his best friend was leaving. It was tough, tough news that Sam was leaving Tokyo. End of an era.

  Chapter 69

  ‘Fool at nightfall

  Seizes a thorn

  Catching fireflies’

  −

  The Guam flight landed at Narita at 14.50 and a car was waiting to take Mochizuki home. The driver, chewing a stick, briefly presented the side of his face to receive the address, and then the back of his thick neck. Mochizuki had no need to talk to him. He had landed with all the problems on the Guam project still on his mind, only some of which he could leave with Iwata. Now his attentions turned to the small domestic issue demanding his time. Just when he didn’t have it.

  As they drew up at outside the front door, he was pressed into his seat by the gentle incline. He was almost too tired to get out of the car, but it was not fatigue that made him reluctant to walk up the familiar slope of the hill. It seemed steeper than the climb on Mount Fuji that he and Kazuko had taken about five years ago. They had made the popular volcanic trek together in June. When they stopped at the last vending machine to rehydrate he recalled how it had upset her to see the street furniture so far up the mountain and associated scattered trash. She had tucked both their empty isotonic cans into her rucksack despite his protestations that there were so many it would do no harm to add to the collection, telling her, ‘Someday soon someone would come and clear it up.’

  ‘Who is that?’ she had objected. ‘The public body for mountain tops? The Etahin men who want to extend their trash collection round from the end of their road in Chigasaki to stretch their legs a little? Perhaps,’ she’d said, ‘they would come over on their weekend off. But no, pardon me.’ She had got heated. ‘They don’t get weekends.’

  He had smiled at her familiar, world-encompassing social conscience.

  ‘You are welcome,’ he had said, ‘to get your rucksack sticky on my account’, and then, to tease her, he had added, ‘Or I can add to the trash?’

  Of course he had taken the rubbish from her hands to humour her world climate-changing sensibilities. It was only then that she realized he had been teasing her all along. They were good friends. He never forgot this.

  He slung his travel bag over his back and watched the car depart as if it meant something to him.

  Today he would have to walk into their home and tell his best friend that he had found himself beholden to a tenacious lover. He could barely deal with the thought. He took a slip of paper from his briefcase and with his gifted Montblanc pen scribbled a few lines. Should he mention it at all? Perhaps the girl would change her mind? He didn’t know. He might yet persuade her not to have the child. The child was a thought that threatened to run round his mind at inappropriate times of the day in small slippers and a tiny kimono, calling his name. But he stopped those thoughts short, as if refusing to acknowledge the embodiment of a ghost. He felt old and it was complicated.

  ‘Tadaima,’ he yelled, as he always did.

  ‘You had a good trip?’ Kazuko called, before coming in to sight to greet him, as she always did.

  He kicked off his shoes in the genkan, placed his Issey Miyake brief case above the step, and dropped into his house slippers. He bent to pick at a loose seam he noticed on the case until he became aware of Kazuko standing above him in the lobby. She was beaming, welcoming him back.

  ‘The bag’s coming apart?’ she said, flipping to share his concern.

  ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘the seam’s loose just by this stain.’

  ‘I can take it in and see to that,’ she offered, brushing aside his disappointment. ‘Give me your jacket. You want to eat?’

  He held it close like a reluctant confessional so that it was she who had to make the effort to take it from him.

  He did want to eat but he handed her his jacket, surrendering himself to her but feeling he had already given away anything else she might really want.

  ‘What’s this?’ She unfolded it, then read aloud, ‘Gu ni kuraku, ibara otsukamu, hotakaru kana.’ Fool at nightfall seizes a thorn catching fireflies.

  She took another look at the haiku and nodded slowly as if comfort were to be found in the inertia of a pendulum. He had brought her haiku before; she was once often used to him doing so. She said nothing. She knew what it meant.

  He sloped over to the last patch of light cutting a harsh angle across the floor.

  To Kazuko he looked as though he were a dog that had been kicked. The Guam project had been tough on him and it clearly wasn’t letting up.

  ‘So did you bring me some souvenir back? Or only poetry?’

  He slumped on the Eames chair and closed his eyes to strategize. In the silence Mochizuki felt the need to rally before what he felt was coming in the form of a tsunami of confessions. He began in self-defence and said accusatively, with some justification, ‘Nice to come back to the house and find you here.’

  ‘What?’ She drew out the vowels in a long indulgent question that relied on a sensible explanation for what seemed to be a barb.

  ‘You are away so often,’ he said, wounded. He would hide behind ‘the wounded party’. He would begin with this ‘justification’.

  His eyes were still closed but he could not acknowledge that he was frightened to look at her. He could hear her back was turned and she was mixing him a drink but he was afraid to look at her as if it were against his principles to shoot someone in the back, which is what it would amount to. He did recognize that his voice lay somewhere between a lugubrious whine and his own register, and she met it with indulgent cheer.

  ‘You are tired and I must get you s
omething to eat. Tea first?’ She fired this into the back of the cupboard and gave it added volume.

  It was his habit to take sencha tea as soon as he got home and though he often made it himself it was something she liked to do for him.

  His sense of duty to her overcame him and he sat upright swinging round in the chair to anchor his feet to the ground and called her.

  His voice was urgent as if he experienced some stabbing pain of the body.

  ‘Wait wait,’ she soothed, coming to rest on her knees in front of him.

  He wiped his face as if dripping in the sweat of exertion. ‘It hasn’t been good,’ he said, looking at her steadily, buying time to bottle out.

  Patiently she waited for the explanation, which did not come.

  He could say nothing.

  Eventually she gave him the line. All she said was, ‘I know.’

  He knew it could not mean she knew about the girl. She was adding to the shared understanding on the Guam stuff that she mostly knew, though of course didn’t know the whole there either. It was a mere throwaway line but the dislocation of what she actually said and what it meant to him was larger than he wanted to acknowledge. It released him to speak.

  Tumbling words competed now to leave his mouth before they scorched it. ‘The girl has caught me.’

  She sank back on her ankles and exhaled from the light body blow. She understood him immediately.

  Kazuko considered the condition might be the result of a liaison with someone else and not his fault. Still rational she had not yet fallen over her own concerns. She knew he had seen a great deal of the girl, more perhaps than she had predicted when she had smoothed the silken kimono, folded right over left, across her ample western chest that day at lunch, condoning an association.

  She herself had chosen her. She’d arranged the dalliance when she had booked their hotel room in Gifu, choosing the old out-of-favour spa to reduce the likelihood of their bumping into any acquaintances of the Mochizukis, a crusty old place that would barely recognize the name, let alone the face, of the renowned architect.

  She laughed at the thought of love when what they had – she and Mochizuki – was so much longer deeper and richer. In lime-fired clay the glaze takes on a patina from the fire the longer it stays in the kiln; the fire burns at a lower temperature and what emerges in the end is blushed with the caresses of the fire and becomes something of the fire itself, distilled. They each had this effect on one another. The foreigner had the hips of a fisher woman and the eyes of Kewpie Chan: large, round, cartoon discs, more suited to the four-legged, bovine or canine. In the east, where the sun goddess Amaterasu rose first in the world every morning, it was appropriate that their eyes should narrow in the great light that fell in all its brilliance across chosen people marked with the eyes to see it. This girl was no more than a plaything like the last one. He had had affairs before. She had seen her as a toy from the start. These foreigners all went home eventually; once they had been shown a good time they left for where they belonged. She had handed her over to him just as she had with the Portuguese girl they had hired before.

  ‘Oningyo. She is a doll.’

  How could he be trapped then by a doll? This was all she was. She was harmless. Dreams remain dreams and he could not be caught by this toy. She must go back to where she came from.

  But then he parted with the actual words. ‘She said … she has told me,‘ he stuttered, ‘that she is expecting a child.’

  On hearing the words spoken they became a truth that fleetingly chastised her for believing she understood how the world worked. How their world worked. It threatened to turn their work, in their wider spheres, to a lie.

  She needed a task and began to head for the kitchen and then checked herself. After all these years of their tacit arrangement, had he fallen like some lovesick seifuku, some child in school uniform, for a foreigner?

  But they left to return home; they all left, and equilibrium was restored. He dallied with these women. He did not dally with her, Kazuko, of the climate-change conference circuit, of the calm voice, the professional, lobbying representative, who understood the mode was as important as the message. Controlled Kazuko. If asked to pack she would allow only hand luggage on the last ship out to anywhere. Whose considered response to the whaling crisis took on arguments from both sides before she showed her true colours without plangency. Kazuko, in her utilitarian urban chic. She let out a cutting wail, a keening sound that came straight from a wounded Kabuki-za character from Ginza; a yowl so extended that it ran the long distance from deep inside her and, as it emerged, disabled a part of her.

  Hiding behind the girl’s reported words he had not laid bare his own emotional position. Her cry became the anger of all wronged women, the injustice of the victims of thieves. And beyond any acknowledgement was the pathos of a single woman who had once had hopes of a child but who had remained childless.

  Her pain and confusion distilled into irritation over how he, her temple guardian, could be levelled by a young girl. He could not be. He would not be.

  ‘Is it true?’

  Was it true ?

  Whatever undertakings he had made, whatever he had said to the girl in their intimate moments ceased to belong to him. He cast off ownership of his past utterances and if asked, were his life to depend on it, what he would vouch for, now above all things, was his allegiance to her. To Kazuko. In his own mind it was without intrigue, malice or weakened resolve. He was overcome with the pure, genuine belief that he owed his life to the woman with whom he had always felt safe. With Kazuko.

  ‘Do you believe this girl?’ she repeated. Getting rid of a child was easier than obtaining contraceptive. For now her mind forbade her to get closer to their intimate details and this stopped her going further. But the impulse broke loose again. ‘Those girls bring contraceptives with them.’ And finally she dismissed the threat with the only conclusion admissible. ‘So you will organize to get rid of the child?’

  It was posed as a question. His default rested in a place where Kazuko would sort out the intractable problems. She was right, of course; this was the only sensible course. It was as if the hours he had spent dreaming were merely the dreams of an overworked man whose position in the world was set to slide and the slow progress down would be more painful than the slow climb to get somewhere in life. He chastised himself that he had not worked on a truly creative project in years, so bound up instead with guest speeches and the adoration of acolytes who thirsted for his energy.

  The closest he had come to fulfillment at work recently was the temple teahouse project and this he had diluted with afternoons with the girl. He derided himself for his weak will and the meanderings that had led him this far from his duties. Let him fall on the sword of his own stupidity but no, he would not go there. He was no Mishima to a cause when Kazuko was there to support him.

  The girl had caught him. He had told her he could not commit to her and it was now obvious she had ignored him. What possible conclusion could he draw from the situation other than that she had tried to trip him up? They were not living in the Meiji era. The girl was wilful and with mounting self-justification he rested on the fact that he had been duped.

  ‘You will speak to her about this,’ she instructed.

  ‘Of course,’ he whispered in a tone of repentance. And he made up his mind to do just that.

  ‘We must eat now.’ And she rose from her knees and prepared two plates, bringing first the condiments to the Nakashima table. She paused to finger the raw edge of bark on the side of the highly polished oak. A design referring back to the integrity of the material; to what it used to be. Things change. Things stay the same. They had saved hard to buy this piece of furniture early on in the marriage. She had worked so very hard on his account, as much as her own, and merely touching on the thought that he no longer needed her sacrifices piqued.

  She marched to the kitchen and, taking up her own plate, scraped the meal into the trash. Bringing only his pla
te to the table she sat to watch him eat, sipping tea she poured from the oversized pot with the worn bamboo handle. They sat for a while in silence as he ate slowly. Eventually she allowed him air.

  ‘We must replace this soon.’ And she shook the near-broken handle.

  Chapter 70

  Sakimake: bad luck in the morning; good luck in the afternoon

  Saito-san had told her there were lucky days in the Buddhist calendar; days upon which it was auspicious to marry, days to avoid for a product launch, days on which to hold a funeral. She had no idea what it was today but Naomi called on powers whose names she did not know and those in whom she did not believe in, to make this a day that was fair to her. She was not asking for more. It did not have to be lucky; just fair. Mochizuki would seal the fate of the child that she was carrying that was undoubtedly his.

  They would meet today just before lunch at the original Olympic pool designed by Kenzo Tange where last month they had come to see a Canadian touring production of Puccini. They had flooded the stage with water and she had wept, and he had shown himself not entirely able to deal with it. She suspected he knew less about the art than she did, an inherited taste like fine wine, an opulence one should take up if one could. She stood under the sweeping eaves of the building looking out over the public space. She recalled one morning when they were working on the teahouse; he had explained the bench under the eaves, where the guests should wait.

  ‘Ko-shi-ka-ke-machi-ais,’ she had enunciated after him, repeating the word to help her memorize it.

  ‘This waiting makes you tranquil,’ he had told her. ‘It is controlled. Like when you do not rush into something. You wait and then you can do it better. Like how you count in rhythm in music before you play your instrument. This is not the waiting in the queue, which is not tranquil. It is different. You must wait to hear yourself inside and then you can do it better.’

  Today she had discovered another type of waiting.

  Such an expanse of empty public space and so much drama. In London it would belong to pigeons and some near-destitute would be taking pleasure in feeding them. Here, black corvids, like punctuation marks, bounced across the concrete, fed by no one but fat on pigeon eggs. A sharp cry in the dry air; a small boy running after his ball had fallen, his soft hat rebounding as he cut his chin. She could see the blood from here. His tardy mother met his fall late, inspected his knees. But Naomi could see she was mistaken, for it was his head he hurt but he was off with the ball again as soon as she had touched him. If he would not keep the child she would not keep the child. If he told her they had a future she would be watching for the child’s every stumble and she would not caress the wrong wound.