The Snow Kimono

by Mark Henshaw

  He had seen Ichiro’s father cradling his son in his arms. Had felt the crow’s clawed feet tense on the young boy’s brow before it launched itself into the air. But where, exactly, amongst these words, was his sorrowing? What strange metamorphosis was this? Why was his heart aching?

  Now, in his room, he thought that perhaps he could see the pattern of his life emerging. He had finally begun to piece things together, make sense of it. This is what you did, at sixty-three, or seventy, or seventy-three. You looked back, contemplated what had happened. Six months ago, he had felt that his life was over. Except for the final reckoning, there would be nothing new.

  But he had been wrong. He could never have predicted Omura walking into his life. His present, his future, were so different from anything he could have imagined then.

  He thought about how many deaths he’d come across these past six months. They were nothing compared to the number of deaths he had investigated in his career—sudden, ghastly, accidental deaths; homicides, acts of rage, mistaken identity; deaths that were premeditated; people burnt to death, shot or stabbed, run over, or killed mid-sentence on their way to pick up their child; people who had died on the operating table. Then there was the richly imagined field of suicides. Some people disappeared without a ripple, forever anonymous, never missed. Others were always there.

  He was sixty-three. Probably half the world’s population had died in his lifetime. Half! And how many billions before that? It made the microscopic teeming at the end of life’s living tip seem so vulnerable. The difference was, he did not know most of them. But someone did. Everyone was at the centre of some more complex web that bound each of us to others. He thought of Omura. Katsuo. He thought of Mariko, Sachiko, Fumiko. And then he thought of Mathilde, his own daughter.

  He could still hear Omura’s voice in his head. He knew now what had happened. He had never wanted him to stop. He had been there with him from the beginning. He was there that afternoon, with Omura, on the snow-covered path, holding Fumiko’s hand. He had stood on the ice. He had looked into the dead child’s frozen eyes. He had held Hiroshi in his own arms. He had been on the bridge with Katsuo the night he waited for Hideo. Had seen the look of surprise on Hideo’s face. Surprise, he imagined, that had turned instantly to understanding. I should have known. He had seen Sachiko dying in the snow.

  And when Katsuo had walked out of the prison gates to see Fumiko standing waiting for him, he had been there watching on. He understood the impossibility of that day. Where did you start? How did you explain a life away?

  Now the image of Omura lying curled in the street came back to him. He was standing by his window, looking down. Snow was falling. And Omura—Katsuo—was gone.

  Acknowledgements

  To my wife, Lee Kerr, to whom this book is dedicated, for keeping us afloat this past eighteen months. And not only that. To my daughter, Georgia, and my son, Harrison, for pressing the send button. To Michael Heyward and David Winter for their brilliant editing, and the rest of the team at Text Publishing. To Kensuke Todo and Jun Imaki—who read the manuscript, or parts of it—for their comments and invaluable insights into things Japanese. To Bill Fagan and David Foerster at Fuji Arts, Ann Arbor, for their unflagging generosity.

  The following works were of use to me in the writing of this book:

  Michel Déon, L’armée d’Algérie et la pacification, Paris: Plon, 1959.

  David Galula, Pacification in Algeria, 1956–1958, RAND Corporation, 1963.

  Edgar O’Ballance, The Algerian Insurrection, 1954–62, London: Faber and Faber, 1967.

  Jules Roy, La Guerre d’Algérie, Paris: Juilliard, 1960.

  An early version of Chapter 1 appeared in Helen Daniel and Robert Dessaix (eds), Neo: Picador New Writing, Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1994.

  The Snow Kimono is a work of fiction. Certain liberties have been taken with actual places and events. For example, the Bastille Day fireworks which occur each year at Le Trocadéro have been transposed, for fictional purposes, to Place de la Bastille. Similarly, certain Japanese festivals have been translocated. The Imperial University of Japan became Tokyo University long before the events described in this book occurred. Specific terms of address have been used more loosely here than they would otherwise be in Japan. Beyond that, as has been said elsewhere, all outright errors and omissions are my responsibility. It remains to say that all characters in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.