Made in Japan

by S. J. Parks

  Miho reached for another blue bowl to add to the stack. She heard it before she felt it; a dull rattle from the pottery inside the store. The dormant quotidian threat for everyone in the street, and they had all become inured to the rumbling pressure releases of regular earthquake tremors. The store lady calmly beckoned her to come towards her. Inside the shop Miho placed the cradled bowl on the counter and then stood at the back of the store side by side with the woman. It was as if they were on the deck of a ship bucking in the waves, waiting it out in silence as the earth kicked. She held the fragile bowl in her sights, watching the self-animated pottery wobble vigorously. Beside her the woman rubbed her hands nervously. The rice bowl hobbled, staggered towards the edge of the glass shelf and threatened a suicide leap to the floor; the absence of sound was drowned by sound.

  After a long minute the uneven pattern of their stilted breathing eased.

  The woman spoke first.

  ‘Keishin?’

  Miho agreed that it was likely a Keishin; it felt like a six on the Richter scale and had been of a relatively short duration.

  With their backs to the wall they fell into debate over the correct description for the quake from a list in their earthquake lexicon.

  ‘So da ne.’ (It is.)

  ‘The great catfish will not be caught.’ The woman referred to the euphemism for the sea-based tremor.

  ‘It objects strongly,’ Miho agreed.

  Before they wrested control of the debris that had shattered across the store, they first began to tidy their experience into words. The jolt was to be categorized, brushing aside the effects of the upheaval as they would reorganize some item of housekeeping.

  The motion passed and it seemed it was over. They could hear nothing, but the metronomic inertia that rang in their ears had almost become audible, as the unstable bowl on the counter finally reached the edge of safety and came crashing down to the floor. It was long after they had expected it and in their gentle cries of regret they bonded, falling back on an idiomatic consolation, so focused on the cheap pot, as if the rest of the world would look after itself.

  ‘After the blossom has fallen it doesn’t return to the branch,’ the woman said.

  Behind a curtain she sought out a dustpan and brush, and slowly they collected the shards together, bending to pick up the pieces.

  ‘What is life but picking up the pieces,’ the older woman continued.

  ‘After disaster, the laundry,’ Miho replied, matching her Zen idiom.

  Falling back on ancient sayings somehow united them with the people who had coined them, and they shared an experience across an ocean of time.

  Miho was on her knees when she saw Kazuko Mochizuki across the road, her bicycle resting against a telegraph pole. Torn between helping the woman pick up the smaller fragments of glass and checking on her elusive friend, Miho made her excuses and ran across the narrow street now littered with shopkeepers surveying the damage.

  Miho had not seen Kazuko at the nursery for a while and she suspected that possibly Naomi was standing between them.

  ‘You okay?’ Neither of them had sustained as much as a scratch.

  Kazuko’s reserve gave in to a tired smile. Miho squeezed her arm in a gesture of unspoken sympathy.

  ‘Can you come over to supper tonight?’ Kazuko asked almost urgently.

  Miho had a launch party she had to attend but suggested another night that week.

  ‘Come, come after the launch. Any time.’

  She was so insistent Miho agreed to see her without promising what time she could get over.

  Kazuko set off wheeling her bike to chart the messy sign-blown street. What remained unsaid between them was so much larger, like the space between the objects.

  Miho returned to the store to purchase the bowls. She had a job to go to.

  Chapter 75

  Inafu: comfort woman

  Later that night, after the launch, Miho arrived at the architect’s house in the dark and was relieved to find only Kazuko at home. In the intimacy of a fragile moonlight they shared an unseasonal drink of plum tea, beside the lantern in the cool evening air, as if seeking some warmth from it. The shadow of the neighbour’s white cat in the garden crossed the paper shoji screen as Kazuko said, ‘You saw your friend at the Minka farmhouse?’

  Miho thanked her for letting them stay. ‘We collected wood and we bathed.’

  Kazuko had done this many times herself with the architect.

  ‘And she is well?’

  Miho felt searched for information she did not have.

  ‘I guess she’s well.’

  ‘Then I guess it falls to me to tell you.’

  Miho cupped her lukewarm bowl of tea, and she knew then that Sam had been right.

  ‘It falls to me to tell you,’ Kazuko repeated, and waited for glimpse of recognition. ‘Your friend is pregnant?’

  This news left Miho with a deafening pulse. ‘No. She did not tell me.’ Miho had had suspicions about an affair and, in her defense, she had barely acknowledged this to herself. She ran though the times she might have been able to talk to Naomi. Kazuko would feel betrayed; she had introduced Naomi to them both and now she could see Kazuko believed she was the catalyst.

  ‘I was prepared to let it – this dalliance – run,’ Kazuko said as she held Miho in her gaze to the point of discomfort. ‘You knew they were having an affair?’

  ‘I think … I think I did. I think we all guessed this maybe was the case. Perhaps I guessed it was just an affair and you didn’t mind.’ Miho wondered how it was that Kazuko had come to know.

  ‘How can I not mind, Miho? He is my husband.’

  Miho heard her own hollow excuses for not warning Kazuko. ‘I didn’t know.’ It would not be Josh’s child, she knew; they would have established that. She released her hold on the cup and Kazuko refilled her tea. Kazuko looked as if she were discussing an item on an agenda, preternaturally calm and unsettlingly determined. Miho guessed she had done all her crying already.

  ‘I really haven’t talked to Naomi,’ Miho continued thinly.

  ‘Miho,’ Kazuko continued with an earnestness that carried a warning for her, ‘I would like …’

  Miho waited for her task.

  ‘I would like you to talk to her.’

  So there was an agenda.

  ‘Will you speak to her?’

  ‘Of course I must.’ Miho found herself a go-between. It was the least she could do.

  ‘I can, perhaps, live with this situation,’ Kazuko continued, ‘with this affair. But to save her relationship she must consider this: if I am to give up something so must she.’

  What exactly did she mean? Miho needed her to say it.

  ‘I want you—’ Kazuko beat out in a rhythm. ‘I want you to tell her …’

  Miho drew back.

  Kazuko paused. ‘Will she listen to you?’

  Miho nodded.

  ‘She must terminate the pregnancy.’

  Kazuko sat back on the rush frame of the floor chair; the moon across the stone lantern casting a long shadow, of sky and earth and water and fire and air: five essential, inert, inanimate, yet to be quickened elements.

  ‘You tell her,’ Kazuko said firmly.

  Many of Miho’s friends had had unwanted pregnancies. They ended by way of a termination and a commemorative stone to Jizo, the god of the unborn. The practice was commonplace. What was Naomi doing, allowing herself to be compromised in this way? She must have some reason for not telling her. Had she intended this? It was unlikely she had told Kazuko, and so how had Kazuko found out?

  As if she followed her, Kazuko said, ‘He doesn’t want the child. He can’t bring himself to tell her but she must realize that he feels she has caught him in some ancient game of women.’

  Miho studied the thin line of green leaf around her cup. Had Naomi lured the architect?

  So Mochizuki himself had talked to Kazuko of the affair, Miho realized.

  ‘It is very easy to solve an
unwanted pregnancy,’ Kazuko persisted.

  Miho saw the unchecked hair fall across her brow; Kazuko was unusually dishevelled. She allowed for the possibility that she could not necessarily trust Kazuko’s word. Had Mochizuki said as much to Kazuko, or was she now putting her own words into the package of his reported speech, to give weight to the argument with more than one voice? Kazuko could tolerate an affair, she had said. She must have done so before now. What she could not accept was a child; a child born to another union; a bond for that union which Kazuko was never able to secure. This inability was a private agony she must contemplate alone. It was too unfair and Miho felt sick with sympathy. Despite this she could not bring herself to promise anything before she had found out how Naomi’s truth would compare with Kazuko’s telling.

  ‘Does she expect to catch him this way?’ Kazuko persisted.

  Miho had no excuses for her friend. She had no idea how where this would lead. And it was upsetting that Kazuko knew before she did, of Naomi’s condition … Unable to find words of consolation, she found only apologies but these were soon spent, leaving her with nothing more to say. How could she undertake to be her messenger on this? Or reassure her on the outcome? Naomi must love him to play so dangerously and to risk so much.

  The moon had shifted. Kazuko’s face was in shade as Miho rose to leave. It was past twelve and as she made her way to the door, her good friend followed her, and all Miho could say to her was, by way of excuse, ‘It seems she loves him very much. I am sorry, ’

  On the porch the full moon washed them both to negatives and in the grey light Kazuko looked more than tired.

  ‘Please,’ Kazuko repeated calmly. ‘Tell her what we have agreed.’

  The next morning at the studios Miho was laying out upturned bowls to form a logo and her mind drifted to Kazuko’s drained face from the night before. Miho was unsure how she would proceed. She knew she could not go to Mochizuki directly and ask him if he was behind any of what she had been told. She would first find Naomi and draw her confidence. Naomi had been too afraid to raise the issue and, now, with an even greater secret to elicit, how likely was it that she would open up? Did Josh know and how would he handle it?

  The camera shutter ran until Yoshi asked her to move the last prop in the line. Tiring of the long session under the warm lights she lost concentration and knocked a bowl to the floor. The name of the noodle bar now fell short of a character.

  ‘Gomenasai,’ she apologized and kneeling to pick up the shards, pieced them together to check for a clean break. The scene of a farmhouse suddenly isolated from the path across the mountains was handpainted in blue across the bowl.

  ‘After disaster, the laundry,’ Yoshi said, as he handed her a broom, laughing. Then, in the flick of a mood change, the photographer left, throwing over his shoulder like a tantrum that a replacement was to be found immediately.

  Miho remembered at the time she had bought them watching the very last one of the batch fall with the inevitability of gravity in the store during the quake.

  Chapter 76

  Doppler Effect

  Naomi’s class of infants was wrapped in woollens, their heads bowed over their open primers. Her heart raced in spite of their small chantings. Mochizuki had sought her board and lodging with the abbot in exchange for teaching the children English. It had all been arranged for her. He had not been to see her in too long. The passing of time had distorted her view of the situation; the recurrent thought that she was on her own, and possibly abandoned, keening and passing like the manifestation of the Doppler Effect as if waves of sound. Her own unvoiced wailing. How far had he gone this time and when he might return to her were unanswerable questions. She began to think she could hear the sea and to wonder what she was doing here at all. She lost control of her breathing and as it competed with her it carried her heartbeat with it and threatened to leave her behind.

  ‘You, Yuki,’ she said in haste to the cricket-box boy sitting by the door. ‘You are in charge. You are to tell Hakuin. He must come to class as I am unwell.’ She ran back to her room and lay down, finding a small joist on the ceiling that offered an anchor point until it began to float as if on a wave, making her feel sickly.

  She closed her eyes.

  Hope, like the limb of a fallen tree, once regenerating and growing straight and tall, had withered and fallen. Her hands rested on her distended belly, the circumference of the child’s world. Now she took alms from the novice monk whose bowl she once had filled. She was a fallen woman and if she brought this scrap into the world where would they find space in the world to live?

  He had not come when he had said he would. She hadn’t seen him for ten days. The suffocating thought made her gasp for breath. She closed her eyes and drifted into an unsound tidal sleep.

  On waking she was wrung out with fatigue. If only she could get a word to him. She would write a letter. Taking up her pen she drank from a cup of cold mugicha tea. It was from the day before and a thin oily sheen patterned the surface, but she would not waste it.

  Iwata was due on his weekly visit to the temple at around ten that morning and she spent her time periodically watching for him. It began to snow and with it her spirits dampened. She waited so long that in her disappointment she forced herself to prepare another lesson. She could neither read nor write. She put on the heavy cotton coat and walked into the gardens with the letter in her pocket. The funematsu pine Mochizuki had pointed out to her on their first visit stood laden with white snow so deep it would break but for the supports that had been strapped to the trunk. It hung in the landscape like a great white-masted ship in the mists.

  She found Iwata outside the Abbot’s offices. He was nursing a cold and clearly did not want to be detained too long. She stood on the icy cobbles balancing precariously as she asked him a favour.

  ‘Iwata-san,’ she began, knowing he had never liked her. ‘I haven’t seen him.’ And though she knew he was no ally, she thrust the envelope into his hand. ‘Could you deliver this letter to Mochizuki?’

  Iwata at jumped her question, but he did at least keep hold of the letter without returning it immediately, which encouraged her.

  ‘Please?’ She searched him for confirmation. ‘Don’t leave it on his desk. If you could put it into his hand?’ They both knew how untidy he was.

  The letter appeared to weigh heavy in Iwata’s hand as he debated the response. He then took it deferentially in traditional style with both hands and a very slight bow.

  And though he mocked her, she thanked him and made her precarious way back up to her lodgings.

  It was nearing lunchtime and Iwata looked in on Hakuin, who he found in the kitchens.

  He slapped him on the back roughly; a greeting he often chose.

  ‘Smells good,’ Iwata said, inspecting the dumplings.

  ‘A boy from the English girl’s class interrupted my meditations and told me that she had run out of class this morning.’ Hakuin felt he should tell of his concern.

  ‘Well, she’s all right now. Just saw her out walking.’ Iwata dismissed the subject. ‘So do I get an invite to lunch?’ He rubbed his hands in anticipation.

  ‘Not today, I am afraid.’

  ‘I feed you and you don’t host me back brother,’ Iwata said exasperatedly. ‘I’ll hit the 7/11 store then,’ he said leaving to deal with his taunting hunger and preparing to expectorate on the step but remembering where he was just in time. ‘I visit Guam next month. I’ll say hello. Shall I bring you a souvenir?’

  Hakuin, who had first fallen into trouble there as a teenager, guessed what sort of souvenir he referred to and hung his head as Iwata left.

  In the car Iwata turned the ignition, wrapping up as he waited for the engine to warm before he switched on the arctic blast of the heater. He removed the letter from his pocket and looked at the title. From the little walking futon to his boss. Letters like little black flies crawled across her envelope. This was her handwriting. ‘Mochizuki-san’, it read in Romanji.
He opened the dashboard glove compartment and stuffed the letter in roughly, then on second thoughts he searched the door pockets for the car manual and, with effort, he leant across to bury it beneath pages of redundant print. Having found an object for his anger he turned on the heater and, as it blew noisily, he allowed himself to calm down in its warmth.

  Chapter 77

  ‘The events of human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that most observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in all the truth of their habits from the remains of their monuments or from their domestic relics.’

  −Honoré de Balzac

  With the champagne reception over, Kazuko and Mochizuki had driven home discussing the sumo tournament where they had been important guests. The man mountain ChiyonoFuji had paced the chalk circle for his dohyō-iri, taken the chikara-mizu and cleansed his body according to ritual. They were so close to the ring, they could see the drops of water as the wrestler flicked the vessel free of its contents. If it was to be believed, courage was invested in the water that the wrestler drank. Mochizuki knew Kazuko would need it. He would have to tell her tonight. There was no ideal moment to broach the subject. The confines of the car were too close. He would wait to tell her. Reluctance led him several times to the very edge of opportunity and then drew him back.

  It was not until they were undressed, sitting in bed, that he found the moment. She handed him his water. And he spoke into the blue-edged handblown glass. It fell from his lips: ‘The girl will not end the pregnancy.’ He left the words lying between them for her to do with them as she would.

  Slowly, quietly, she reacted, as he would have expected of the woman with whom he had spent so many years.