Made in Japan

by S. J. Parks

  ‘I wish to have the child,’ she said.

  He found her simplicity chilling.

  ‘The girl is not fit,’ she continued, ‘and I believe we must look after it. She should leave. She should go home to England and I should take on the child when she goes home.’ Her voice was hardened with determination and he was, at first, stunned to silence.

  He had made promises to Kazuko and now she had tied his hands behind his back she was testing the limits in her powerful hold over him.

  ‘But we …’ He replaced the hard white crockery on the draining board. ‘That is completely ridiculous,’ he objected. A seeping horror that Kazuko, in holding a position of strength, had begun to believe she could abuse it, crept over him and with it a doubt in his own agency over those events. So often she had readily taken control. Everything they had built they had built together.

  He found his shoes suddenly covered in water as the linen cloth in his hand had, as he relaxed hold, dropped a corner into the sink. And he was soaked by his own negligence.

  ‘Argh,’ he complained, and Kazuko took the wet towel from him and began mopping the trail of water. Immovably and quietly, he said, ‘No, this will never be the case. Do you understand me?’

  Kazuko continued mopping and she did not answer him.

  Chapter 86

  Ishinomaki, Miyagi, Summer 2011

  Years had passed. Kazuko sat alone in front of a TV special report. A procession of men got off the bus, it was the same sort of vehicle that the school had hired last time they took the children from the Yochen on an outing to the Minkaen Park in Kawasaki to see the old farmhouses. The line of TEPCO employees, immortalized in seconds of National Television coverage, walked down the steps as if alighting for a countryside trip. The men in protection suits each carried a box, sized somewhere between a toolbox and a lunch pack.

  The NHK commentator explained the latest TEPCO employees on the clean-up following the Tohoku nuclear plant disaster wore gas masks with 0.0001 per cent fallibility. They were there to stem the flow of toxic waste as it leeched into the Pacific. Kazuko shivered.

  The report continued; where she wondered, where were the international friends when you needed them most? And who was it that would volunteer for this role? These men would be Etahin. She knew this. She began to flip channels on the remote, pressed mute and held it between her hands like a prayer. A distance had crept surreptitiously between her and her old campaigning zeal. At one of her conferences, it was in Canada, she had become close, maybe too friendly, with one of the other delegates. They’d had coffee during the recesses and he had slapped her on the back and called her ‘comrade’ and they had decided they were fighting guerrilla warfare. She still had the Che Guevara T-shirt he had given her. Of course she’d never worn it. So many missed opportunities: She didn’t get to know him. She didn’t get to Kyoto. She didn’t get to Copenhagen and the list rang in her ears. She had given up so much. The ticker tape of world events ran on and because of the small dramas of her own life she had left the big issues unattended.

  When Mochizuki had first come on to her, she was attracted to his broad sensibilities. She had to admit her personal life had interrupted any bigger achievements she’d once hoped for, easily caught up with more immediate issues. She had sidelined the bigger stuff and left the world to its own devices to focus on mainichi no toso, the daily struggle. She had held on to Mochizuki after the affair with the girl all those years ago and this had been for her an important victory. She took out her glasses and went back to her sudoku. It was like the siren from a passing ambulance; The noise distorted as it went and depending on where you stood, it became less shrill. Perspectives changed as events moved on.

  Four days later, over their fish supper, Mochizuki had told her he would be volunteering to offer his architectural skills in the reconstruction operation in Fukushima. Years ago she had spent time struggling to keep a hold of her man with the cormorant tattoo and this time she had lost the fight for him. He was unleashed and she understood his need to go, no matter how unwelcome she found it. He was an outsider, Etahin; he had to go with his people.

  Chapter 87

  :)

  After 11.03.11 comes 2012

  Ed headed back to his flat expecting to find the arts and crafty girl waiting for him. He imagined her dark hair across his sofas, lying in wait for him, reading, perhaps. He was looking forward to sharing a meal. On arrival the flat was empty and the girl was gone. It was very tidy and felt unlived in again. The empties were in a bag at the door.

  He guessed she hadn’t taken him seriously. Why wouldn’t he mean it. He should have skipped work for the day? He should but he knew it was unthinkable in his job. If he thought he knew who she was, how come he had no idea of where she might be now. What was she doing and was she with someone else? He would leave a message once he had checked with the doorman for his keys.

  His keys had been returned to the desk, so he guessed she wasn’t planning to come back. He ignored any reservations and decided to take the JR Yamanote line out from Shibuya go on to Shimo’s Club. It was too early for a doorman and a few minutes were enough to establish that the girls weren’t there. At the bar a woman in jeans wearing a traditional wig stopped him. She was such a walking carousel of dangling ornaments, he was tempted to look for price tags. Perhaps it was because he had an English accent – he didn’t know – but she told him Hana no longer worked there but that he could try an address. She scribbled the number and chome on a receipt and handed it to him saying it was minutes away

  At the junction of the road and the track that led to Hana’s lodgings he overshot, missing it completely. Unable to find the address, he double backed on himself and decided to try the track. By now, approaching nine in the evening, he guessed she could have left and be might be out for the night. A wasted journey. He looked a little desperate – even to himself – now the effort wasn’t likely to amount to anything. He passed the cracked pots on the wall beneath a gate light and after some time he resolved to knock. Even before his hand left the door someone opened it and an older woman stared at him quizzically, a middle-aged man was behind her,.

  Armed with Japanese picked up on the company language course he tried to explain to the woman that he was looking for Hana, a girl from England. And while he felt moderately confident that she would understand he couldn’t fully get what was being said in response. If she wasn’t there, where was she? He turned away, remembering in time to thank them. He was halfway down the path when it occurred to him that she might be in a serious relationship with someone else. They hadn’t exactly covered that. Maybe she spending the night somewhere else in Tokyo. But after the plane – talking last night, on balance, he guessed he knew. He went back to the door.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I will come tomorrow.’

  Hana was alone in the room and from the window saw him by the gate lamp. As he opened the gate to leave she could see it was Ed. She hesitated. He shouldn’t have asked her to stay. What was he doing? Had she left something at his flat? Like the last girl? She remembered with embarrassment. And how had he found the address? She opened the window and taking a full lung of night air was about to shout. Her voice might have reached across the city, but she let it go , deciding not to call after him, instead sinking onto the end of her bed. All she wanted was company. If only it was as easy as instant coffee; taking a spoonful, adding water, stirring. She was homesick and it was time to leave. Her ticket was open-ended and she would head home. She had, at least, found the teahouse and it had brought back memories of her mother. In the in the morning she would go and say goodbye to Miho.

  Chapter 88

  The following day Ed’s newspaper carried editorial on the opening ceremony for the World Trade Centre, a sustainable design by Fumihiko Maki, the Pritzker Prize-winner. Limited carbon footprint, the usual copy with sustainability tick boxes …

  Yoshi kicked Ed as he passed. ‘Not working today, Ed? What can we bring you? I’ll maybe
read it after you? Couple of things to do. For clients it might possibly be in our interests to keep happy?’

  Ed threw aside the newspaper. ‘Okay, okay. What can I do for you? he said, warming to his company.

  ‘In actual fact,’ Yoshi said. ‘I was doing something for you. The Municiple Registration question.’

  Hana’s Registration. Ed needn’t bother now but wouldn’t let on Yoshi had wasted his time.

  ‘What have you got?’

  Yoshi sat down. ‘Well, it depends on what sort of parentage your friend has. Did he say?’

  Ed thought about telling him but decided that, just now, as the source of the enquiry had disappeared from his life, he really didn’t need to divulge who it was.

  ‘No, he didn’t. In what way do you mean?’

  ‘So you are interested in registration of births right? So firstly the Koseki registration will cover births, deaths, and everything in between. Japanese lineage. It’ll all be documented. I don’t foresee much trouble finding out. Adoption, divorce. Life’s intricacies. Legal paternity has to be listed here in the koseki. It should cover illegitimate children, unmarried mothers and Etahin. Well, I should say Dowa. Anyway, I’ll look into this for you.

  Ed had had his ear bent by Roddy on this topic not too many nights ago.

  ‘They will have to sign our terms of engagement, of course.’

  ‘Come on, Yoshi. Will that be necessary? Can we call in a favour?’ Why he bothered to pursue the issue when the girl was as good as gone, he couldn’t be sure. ‘The point is, Yoshi, can we get to see a copy of the certificate with the parents names?’

  ‘No, company guidelines – not unless they’re a registered client.’

  ‘I see. Right.’

  This seemed to be Yoshi’s last word on the subject and Ed was inclined to assume the cause was no longer his responsibility.

  ‘Okay,’ he gave up, threw down his paper gearing up to start the day .

  At the end of the evening Ed walked the short distance from the Hiroo subway home. Hana was waiting for him on the verge outside the apartment block in the last of the sunshine. He didn’t know how long she had been there but she was sitting down beside her cloth bag, reading a book.

  ‘I left a basket,’ Hana said.

  Wasuremono, he thought. That is what she was to him. Lost property.

  In a momentary stand-off, he finally gave in to a natural reaction.

  ‘Well, come on up.’

  He turned excitedly to punch the key code into the lobby entry system. How many times had he keyed in the number and now the process failed.

  ‘You left the key?’ he asked her

  Hana smiled. ‘No, I have a key and can let you in to your own apartment.’

  But the porter had told him? He suddenly got it. The piano teacher had returned a key. He was off the hook. The right girl had kept his key.

  ‘Did get you get to Tsukiji fish market.?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘How about tomorrow?’ He called the lift.

  ‘Why not?’ she said brightly

  Under the lights of the elevator he kissed her.

  She took to the runway sofa as he poured her a drink.

  ‘You find out any more about your father?’

  Hana laughed as if the question was ludicrous.

  ‘At the office …’

  Ed wondered whether he should pass on that Yoshi told him her father might be from the Dowa, the Etahin. Perhaps he might not.

  She had his full attention.

  ‘It isn’t easy,’ he began as she interrupted him.

  ‘I’m done with looking back.’

  Chapter 89

  ‘The first gesture of an architect is to draw a perimeter; in other words, to separate the microclimate from the macro space outside. This in itself is a sacred act. Architecture in itself conveys this idea of limiting space. It’s a limit between the finite and the infinite. From this point of view all architecture is sacred.’

  −Mario Botta

  Kazuko had not been up to the temple grounds for many years. It was a long time since she had visited in that heavy winter when she had gone to spy on the girl carrying Mockhizuki’s child. Today she walked purposefully around the familiar waters of the ornamental lake. She drew her light coat around her, fists in patch pockets. Stopping at the little field of Jizo, tied with red rag bibs, she surveyed the rows of small stone figures piled into cairns by many women. Quickly she bent down and began to fill her wide pockets with the smooth round stones from the larger statues. Her summer coat had ample room and the stone collection hit her knees as she took laboured paces towards the water. She stood for a moment on the side of the lake and then stepped closer towards the damp and reedy edge. She had not said goodbye but she knew anyway she would not see Mochizuki again. Calmly, as if she were about to take an analgesic to rid her of her insomnia, she stepped into the water and began to wade across the reeds to the depths the centre with the teahouse in her sights.

  Chapter 90

  From the window of the train, a temple torii stood on the hill. The kanji for heaven. He remembered the torii at Shakira’s temple where he and the girl had played out their affair at the teahouse. Mochizuki had loved the girl and he was in no doubt about that. She often lay on his mind like a drowsy hangover from their wild enjoyment of one another, and it was twenty years or more since he had seen her.

  He became old the morning he left her. Even now silent tears crossed the bridge of his nose. Naomi had waited patiently for him to explain why it was that every promise he had ever made to her was to be broken. Why it was that though he had agreed with her that they should keep the child, he urged her to leave for England. When he handed her money for the ticket she had not cried. Had she overlooked the rotten heap of more than shattered vows he had made to her? Over the years since she had left Japan the temptation to make contact her, which, at first he had to resist, had faded completely.

  Travelling north-east, the morning sun was at his back and the carriage was warm and without distraction. The JR train line ran through agricultural land and across orchards. The bright arms of cherry trees waved at him. Hanafubuki, he had renamed her. The moment in spring when the wind catches the blossom and a snowstorm of petals falls, driving it to the ground in drifts.

  Reaching the flood plain, the flotsam that was once a whaling town lay in stubborn desecration. Kazuko had remarked sardonically that the great tsunami had at least finally interrupted the whaling. It had carried the boats inland to rest on a sea of broken shards of debris. The giant carcass of a huge ocean-going cargo vessel remained several kilometres inland beyond the highway, but without carrion for the scrap metal it lay at anchor with its navigational and fish-factory lights still laced across the upper deck like a festival. The conning tower could have housed the population of an outlying village but they had all been swept away on the riptide and, besides, as the port was now prone to flooding, efforts had been made to offer accommodation on the higher ground in container units. He would work on this.

  Ukai’s passing had released him. He had never been able to break loose since he’d given him his first commission and coaxed him into a line of schemes that were never wholly legitimate. An outsider from the same village, he’d threatened to destroy the reputation he had fought so hard to win. What did he expect of the yakuza? He could not say that he had fared entirely badly from the association. Kazuko, during all those years of complaints, understood how strongly he had shaped their lives. He had not attended his memorial and he now had no need to stay. He had remained deaf to Kazuko’s pleas,

  The train rocked on a signal change. As he travelled closer to the eye of the disaster, he felt the better for it. He was doing the right thing for the first time in a long time. It was common knowledge that the resilience of those housed in the temporary village was ebbing, and though he carried no evangelical hopes, he wanted to add his efforts to the process of rebuilding.

  The long, slow, reconstructi
on process of Ishinomaki Genki Fukko (happy recovery) following Tōhoku 2011 would take decades. From the carriage window a fisherman cast his line over the sea wall and over his head a cormorant flew in a graceful free dive towards the Pacific Ocean.

  Author’s Note

  Etahin or Dowa People

  The Etahin are part of an old caste system that has survived in Japan until the twenty-first century. For generations they have been the subjects of sectarian discrimination and carried separate identity cards, and it is only in the last decade that they have had the right not to disclose their racial origins when applying for a job. In feudal times they were regarded as outcasts and deemed impure – finding work as tanners, butchers and undertakers. Today they remain ghettoized. Seventy per cent of the main criminal yakuza gangs are made up of these dispossessed people. They populate the subculture of Japan, working in the gambling and sex industries. In the nineteenth century one of the Etahin, ‘village people’, rose to become a regional politician. They originate from the regions of Kobe and Osaka.

  About the Author

  S.J. Parks, a literature graduate, has lived and worked in Japan. Parks has a writing MA from the University of London and now resides in England with her family. Made in Japan is her first novel.

  About the Publisher

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