Made in Japan

by S. J. Parks

  On a wind shift, the smell from the stall selling yakitori chicken drifted over. Was the noren banner over the canopy waving goodbye? She was hungry and the leaden sky sat like a brooding anxiety on her chest.

  Beneath the great curtain of eaves on the stadium she recalled Josh’s attempts to liken the structure to a Malthusian curve or some other two-dimensional figure on a graph. Josh would be taking katsudon round the corner from his office at around this time. She had not seen Josh for several weeks. Waiting had tired her and risking the cold she slumped like a teenager to sit on her haunches against a wall out of the wind.

  A huddle of coats passed. The smell hit: out-of-season hyacinth, favoured by elderly ladies. Visitors from outside the city. Would he find her now through the engulfing passage of falsetto chattering, through this cloud of starlings? They followed their flag-toting leader inside the building and she searched the expanse of the concourse again, in case he had missed her. And then, there at the end of the concourse, was a fleeting shape in the distance. The traffic moved continuously. She picked him out quickly, that familiar gait approaching as if he had time on his hands, his dark shirt stealing the man and turning him to an empty jacket. She found it unnerving. He had on the crumpled linen jacket he wore the day he interviewed her so many months back at his offices in Chigasaki.

  It was days since she had seen him. They offered one another the wrong cheeks and his greeting was awkward but she met it with well-disguised disappointment as he flattened the wayward linen on his lapel in a pointless exercise.

  As if he were the one in need of support she took his hand almost surreptitiously and he curled his fingers up through hers to touched the web of skin deep between the fingers, the skin that, though so accessible, a stranger never touches. With this intimacy, she gauged the strength and measure of his emotion at seeing her after nearly a week. To hold his hand was a simple delight.

  They walked towards Meiji-jingumae and the ornamental gardens near the shrine where, in her first few days in Tokyo, she and Josh had walked beside sharp spears of iris guarding the water’s edge. A wild animal could no longer lurk in the once-Rousseauesque undergrowth, now so changed with the seasons, with the metabolic rate of the city itself. She leant closer on Mochizuki’s arm as they walked.

  He finally chose to speak.

  ‘You like living at the temple?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t care where I live. And for now it’s a haven.’

  ‘You are an outsider, Naomi.’

  She laughed it off. She could not ask him if that was to her advantage. He should not regard her as needy.

  ‘I am an outsider,’ he responded.

  Not knowing where his train of thought was leading him, she asked, ‘So, we are getting closer?’

  ‘We are both outsiders but you are an international outsider, a foreigner, which is different.’

  His own credentials as an international were possibly better than her own. He had worked in New York, Toronto, Paris. She was a Londoner.

  ‘But your career is international.’

  The tattered career.

  He lifted a long finger, as if bidding her pause; a conductor orchestrating music. Though it looked measured, as if he was in control, he was struggling with a couple of sumo wrestlers that had taken hold of his stomach and he knew there would never be an eventual winner. They might never let go and he would forever be locked in a sickening bout of internal wrestling. On the one hand Kazuko had always supported him and without her it would have been impossible to build the career he had enjoyed and, now, with the girl, was the question of the love child they might have created. He had lived with a woman for his married life and he had made promises, he had been guided by her and she was willing him to stay so she could lead him comfortably towards the future that was as predictable as any old age could be, nursed in the universal respect for his achievements, where students would seek an audience. Or he could begin again with a different girl. He ran in pursuit of the resolutions he had made when he moved his lips, shaping them round words of promises he had given to Kazuko. But logic failed him, his memory failed him and as he ran after these thoughts he failed to stop himself falling in with the hand he held there that moment. His spoken allegiance was lost and he turned sides.

  He swung round to grab her and wrap her in his feelings, for he had no other means of expression. And he kissed the top of her head her and she swelled with need for him. He stooped closer to breathe in the opiate that was her until they were startled by a party of escapees from the offices nearby who had come to enjoy a mittened lunch on the sheltered side of the gardens. While his head ached in the confusion of abandoned plans, she could read none of it. He made one last lunging attempt to say what he had come to say.

  ‘No, I belong to an old traditional country where I am one of the dispossessed.’

  She looked at him as if he were talking nonsense but let him finish.

  ‘I am tied by my obligations and you are not. I should buy you an air ticket to England before I have you live in a monastery.’

  His words blew through as if a howling wind bringing a sudden drop in temperature, but she rested on all he had done for her and all he had said before now and she read his offer as concern for her self-sacrifice and as a question over whether she was sure that a future with him was one should choose.

  ‘No,’ she said simply. ‘No. I begin to belong here.’

  On her response came the realisation for him that he was glad to hear it. While he was with her he forgot his tangled heart and the duty and the loyalties he had forged over the years.

  ‘We must eat,’ he said, drawing her from the park and back to the mainstream.

  Chapter 71

  Earth, fire, air and water co-existent; opposing elements in a contest over dominance.

  Kazuko heard him replacing his bicycle in the purpose-built shed that he had put together with Iwata one week. He had cut his hand then and had come in to find her so that she could wash it. His own hammer blow had pinched the skin so hard it had bled. She had tied it with a bandage and asked him to hold it aloft for a while, to stop the blood pooling and they had laughed when he identified that she had turned him into a lucky cat, white paw held high. It had been at the start of the Guam project and they had believed that it would bring him the fortune that would match his fame so she had said he was indeed her lucky mascot and the hammer blow was a good omen. Very distinctly she recalled he had said, ‘You know best, Kazuko’, and his confidence had filled her with pride.

  His bike was on the wall fixture, opposite hers. When he had conceived of the store he had planned it would remain a passageway along the edge of their narrow plot, utilising all the available space. It was a principle of his, from domestic to his larger concepts, like the atrium he conceived where the transparent water system for the whole building channelled through four floors of the glass interior. They would soon, he hoped, get that languishing concept approved for construction. A fresh project and a new perspective was on its way.

  Kazuko, meanwhile, opened some mochi cakes and lay them on a tea platter. He would have told the girl today and equilibrium would be restored. The design of life. She smiled as she laid out a third skewer of dusted sweet cakes across the others in an afterthought of generosity.

  On his arrival she took his jacket, poured his tea and sat in the pose she readily adopted for earnest conversation: one elbow resting on a crossed knee, chin in hand, supporting her enthusiasm.

  She had today, she told him, witnessed a small breakthrough when the world had been persuaded to hold talks on the big environmental issues in Kyoto. Finally after this discussion, like one well versed in handling the needs of conference lobbyists, she came very gently to ask him about the girl.

  ‘Chotto,’ he prevaricated, hoping to communicate the difficulty he had in raising the issues. He had vacillated over when he would he break it to her. He believed he had not seen the girl in any timeframe that allowed him to raise any serious subj
ect with her and consequently he certainly had not told the girl to terminate the pregnancy. All this was difficult for him to admit and at the top of the list was not broaching it. Kazuko waited patiently.

  ‘It’s difficult,’ he repeated what his tone had communicated earlier.

  ‘What is so difficult?’

  Sometimes she seemed more like man to him. But he must stand his ground. She could be so unemotional in responses. This, he had always believed, had allowed her to get things done. To achieve.

  He looked away from her undivided attention in a gesture of under-confidence.

  ‘I’m no good at these things. I draw. I create. I’m not good with communication. You know what words are to me. I stumble.’

  She nodded encouragingly as if understanding deep conflicts as yet unrecognized by the patient but soon to be vented, translated and divided into neat piles. These could then be settled upon at random and dealt with according to the in-tray. She looked grave with disappointment.

  A tremor shook his body and he began to weep. He began to weep in front of his woman because she had consented to look away from the dalliance but now he knew he had hurt her.

  They shared the torture of silence and Kazuko’s noiseless tears joined his voiced regret.

  He put a hand out to her blindly and they interlaced fingers, holding the sorrow together. The small wind chime, with its streamer printed with the slogan ‘May peace prevail on earth’, sounded on the breeze through the open garden door and the tree camouflaged them in shadow.

  Finally Kazuko said, ‘You want me to give her the message that you cannot give her?’ She had expected his extended ramblings would follow, but he simply said,‘Yes.’ The strength of his reaction encouraged her.

  Later that evening she opened the bathroom door and was presented with his back bowed over in the steam.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘I need a cigarette.’

  She hesitated, tempted to enter and to wash his back as she so often did, but she decided against it.

  She returned, taking a mini drag on the cigarette for him. He could take his chances in the damp atmosphere and see if he could keep it alight. He barely moved as she placed it between his lips but grunted his thanks.

  Chapter 72

  ‘Manaiota no ue no koi’

  (A carp on the cutting board)

  Naomi waited beneath the red wings of the torii gate for so long her back had become sore. She knew now that he would not come. Threaded lanterns danced on air, thick with chanting and the smoke from the yakitori chicken seller. The makeshift stage stood empty, hoping for dancers, and the children from the nursery, in turquoise happi coats, ran across the temple ground as if released for one day only from their small obligations.

  The festival was at its height and too charged an atmosphere, and she knew she did not belong. These were not her traditions, these were not her people, and so she turned to leave. Eight men in loincloths came into sight carrying the mikoshi and with every beat of the taiko drum it urged them to lift the festival shrine higher on their shoulders. The sweatbands around their heads were stamped with the corporate sponsor Ukai. Bearing the weight of tradition was an onerous task; marching in step they paced back in time. A red, lacquered phallus was strapped around the shortest man’s waist and he toyed with it for the crowd and they roared in support as he upheld their ritual to the fertility gods. Behind her lines of white paper, zigzag folded prayers bound to the shrine with hemp rope. What she needed now was a prayer.

  Shoeless, Naomi walked into the wooden teahouse for the last time. The branch of the tree that formed the door lintel was so low that the average man would have to duck to clear it. He was not an average man. In places between the original knots, dark gnarled bark clung to the rough limb because his designs were steeped in Zen awareness. He’d said in twenty-five years they would rebuild the teahouse. This was not futile – the perpetual renovation that accommodated the psyche living on a fault line. If it was understood that a programme of rebuilding was scheduled, then the accident of disaster could not have the same devastating effect. This was birth and this was death, she believed now. This was preparedness, this was resilience. It was what she must find when the tectonics of her life were about to shift so fundamentally that she would be stripped of everything she once relied on. She would rebuild.

  She would look to herself for the sake of the child. Her hand drew across the circumference of her belly; the world was a hemisphere for the child as yet unborn. The baby might look like him. If it should live. If she should ever see the newborn face. And where would they live? On this side of the world where she found herself now, or the country where she began? They were now, for her, the same place. A question of where to belong when they would both be outsiders wherever they chose.

  In the distance across the temple grounds the baked potato seller called, ‘Jagaimo.’

  The call took her back to the many evenings she bought steaming, hot, sweet potatoes from his wheeled cart, which was now all she could afford. She had become a twentieth-century pauper.

  ‘Jagaimo,’ came his wailing call again, with a lilt of voiced pain that she could almost feel.

  She drew the warm fleece overcoat around her and smilingly hoped for a girl. Who was this child? A leg, perhaps an elbow, even now charted the confines of a limited world that they share, and, from deep inside her, drew a fault line across smooth, taut skin. What would she tell of her story?

  There would be no stories any more since the narrative of a child’s life was to be watched over and overheard; to be retold and to have said to have taken place. A history displaced.

  Chapter 73

  Mochizuki had last left Naomi in tears and now sat in meditation in the teahouse to clear his mind. He rose and, stooping beneath a rough branch that formed the lintel, stepped into his shoes to gather a bundle of shrubs and flowers that were lying wrapped in old newspaper outside the door.

  He returned to sit before a rough pottery vase and took up a pair of rudimentary scissors. These were forged from two pieces of iron and he imagined the man who had made them testing the large irregular handles for size. He cut the rough hemp string that bound the shrubs and began to assess them. Holding each at arm’s length, he examined the shaft for knots and twists, and the way the leaves were angled. Silent but for the branches as they touched the paper, he sorted them into two piles, one that fitted his aesthetic principals that he would use and one that he would not.

  His breathing was even and regular. At the base of the vase lay heavy, pink, mottled stones covering the spiked iron holder. From the glazed jug beside him he poured just enough water to cover the base. He chose one of the longest branches.

  Naomi expected so much of him and his problem was that it was not his to give her. He owed so much to Kazuko he could no more desert her than he could give up Naomi. He cut a sharp angle at the base of the stem, thrusting the branch into the spiked kenzan, wishing he could punish himself. Stripping every single leaf but two from the second branch, he wanted to rid himself of morbid thoughts, angry that his preoccupations ran in torturing circles so often that he had ceased to function properly and his meditations failed to appease them.

  A diffused light fell on the paper walls. He had tried to screen off the world outside in an attempt to better know the man he was within and to finalize his decision with the girl. A shadow crept across the mat from a maple tree and he remembered the first day he had brought her to meet Shakira before the old teahouse had been dismantled, before they had worked together to build a new one in its place.

  He toyed with the angle on the shorter stem until it assumed a position that could be regarded as an accident of nature. The broken leaves were pungent and sharp, dominating the fragrant grass matting of the room. Finally he took a shorter contorted branch; a bloom on the withered hikae, the third and last stem in his arrangement and brought it to his face. He closed his eyes and took in its scent. He positioned it between the shin and soe, where,
protected, nurtured almost by the dark earthy tones of their branches, the sensual flower emerged.

  It was a long time since Shakira had taught him something of the principles of Ikebana flower arranging’s rigid aesthetic, which had informed his own view of the importance of the space between substance in his architecture. The buds, so translucent they recalled the veins on a hand, balanced on a small ridge in time, cut and even now presaging decay.

  He leant back to review his creation and then picking the stray pieces from the tatami, rolled up the newsprint and tied the debris in a parcel. He stopped to read an article on the old yellowing paper of the Shimbun; the Japanese had offered 9 million US dollars in aid to the victims of the Armenian earthquake. This at least should have an impact on the size of his own dilemma. It pained him to think it did not. He opened the shoji door and placed his bundle carefully outside on the step. He then closed the screen and drew back to review his arrangement; he looked at it briefly and then kicked it over with a stark and counterpoised aggression, upsetting the vessel and leaving water to pool across the tatami matting in a stain.

  Chapter 74

  Miho squatted outside the pottery store, browsing upturned rice bowls floating like flotsam across the road. She couldn’t raise too much enthusiasm for styling the photographic shoot for the noodle client. That weekend at the Minka farmhouse had begun the rift in her friendship with Naomi when it had lost a certain intimacy. She had tried a few times to coax her into opening up but each time she had been blanked. She hadn’t seen her in a long time now. Sam had suspected the architect was the cause.