Jasmine

by Noboru Tsujihara

  “Spends all her time in her cabin. But she’s a real somebody – wife of the Chinese consul, I hear.”

  “How did you find that out?”

  “Just ask the purser, he’ll tell you. She’s gorgeous, too.”

  Four or five seagulls glided towards them from the bow, skimming the side of the ship. On the horizon appeared the dark shapes of the Tokara Islands, each one capped with a winding cloud like smoke from a volcano. The lady was not done talking, but with scarcely a backward glance, he hurried to his cabin.

  Why didn’t she come out? What about her meals? There was no sign of them being delivered to her door. This seclusion was exactly the proof he needed that the person in question was not just Li Yan, but also Li Xing. She had discovered he was on board, and she didn’t want to meet him. Why not? Because she was Li Xing. But in that case, why avoid him? His mind travelled endlessly in circles.

  “We are now passing Kusagaki Island,” came an announcement.

  He lay on his back in bed and smoked a cigarette. He opened his collection of Arabic poetry, closed it again, had a swig of Scotch from the flask. He stared at the ceiling and focused on the rocking of the boat and the vibrations of the engine being conveyed to the muscles in his back, trying to calm himself. He went down to the dining room. No sign of her. He ordered a steamed bun, soup, and beef with green peppers. The food was piping hot and tasted far better than five years ago.

  He got in line at the register, behind the ubiquitous woman from Osaka. Her turn came and someone began to ring up her bill. Aki glanced over casually towards the entrance. Just past the door he could see the curve of the spiral staircase connecting two stairwells. A light grey flared skirt came partway down the stairs, stopped at waist height and wavered uncertainly, then abruptly fled back up out of sight. Li Yan. He broke out of line, intent on pursuit, only to feel the Osaka woman clutch his arm.

  “Sorry,” she said, “I’m all out of coins. Could you change this for me?”

  Hurriedly he grabbed a fistful of bills and coins from his pocket and laid it by the register. “Be right back,” he said. “Go ahead and use this.”

  “Hang on, wait a minute, you can’t leave all that!” She wouldn’t let go. She was surprisingly strong.

  Trapped, he stared at the spiral staircase with a baleful look meant rather for his captor. On the spot, he devised a plan. After good-naturedly providing change for a fifty-yuan note, he calmly settled his own bill and then mounted the stairs, hanging onto the banister like a kid.

  This time, he was able to accost a female attendant. “Just now in the dining room, the passenger in cabin A7 left this behind. I don’t want to disturb her, so I’d appreciate it if you could hand it to her.” He passed over the retractable ballpoint pen he always carried in an inner pocket: red ink, blue ink, and a mechanical pencil.

  After making sure the attendant was headed for Li Yan’s cabin, he ran out on deck, went around by the bow, and ducked back into a corner of the passage leading past the VIP cabin. The attendant came down the corridor from the opposite direction, stopped in front of cabin A7, and knocked. Li Yan would probably open the door a mere crack, just enough to peer outside. If he timed it right, he could stroll by and get a good look at her face.

  The attendant called out, telling the occupant she had forgotten something. Three times she identified the item: yuanzhubi, a ballpoint pen.

  Aki waited several seconds and then, hearing the faint click of a lock being released, stepped quickly into the corridor and began walking aft. The door of A7 opened a fraction. The attendant held out Aki’s pen towards the crack in the door. The crack widened.

  Through the thirty-centimetre space peered the face of Li Xing.

  “I didn’t leave anything anywhere,” came a small voice. As she spoke, she spotted a man behind the attendant, off to one side. With scarcely any change in her voice, she thanked the girl, snatched up the pen, and slammed the door shut. The lock clicked. There was a finality to it.

  The attendant stood there rather taken aback, then turned to look in the direction the woman in A7 had been staring. There stood Aki, who cheerfully returned her nod before nonchalantly opening his cabin door, strolling inside, and closing the door behind him. Instantly his expression changed, and in his excitement, both arms went up in celebration. No doubt about it – it was Li Xing! A little thinner, maybe.

  In the cabin next door, a little girl was sobbing. Her mother spoke to her sharply, and the wails increased. “Bu shufu, bu shufu.” I don’t feel good.

  Li Xing was in a cabin adjacent to the little girl on the other side. Realizing that she would also be hearing this, Aki’s eyes unexpectedly filled with tears. He wanted the child to go on crying without stopping.

  24

  The moment she saw him, Li Xing hastily closed the door and locked it. She leant against the wall for support.

  “He’s come back to me,” she murmured, wrapping her shawl around her shoulders. “But it’s too soon.”

  The thought was a hollow one. Too soon? When they’d been apart for five years? If he ever heard her say this, it would break his heart; he’d never understand.

  Li Xing had been aware of Aki’s presence all along. She first spotted him on his way to the ship, as he paused on the pier by the bow. Having boarded early with a VIP pass, she was sitting in her cabin looking idly out the porthole. She looked down at a spot on the pier three metres or so from a bollard. And there he was.

  The shock was huge. She couldn’t believe her eyes. How could it be? It’s impossible. He can’t be standing there!

  Wearing a dark brown turtleneck sweater and black leather jacket and carrying a black bag with orange trim, Aki glanced up at the ship. A second before he did so, she ducked behind the curtain. I’m not his Li Xing anymore, I’m Li Yan. Zhang Liang’s wife. She pulled the curtain tight shut.

  Now from the adjacent cabin came the sound of a child sobbing. Bu shufu, bu shufu! Poor little thing. But Li Xing had suffered from seasickness, too. Just like the girls from Jiangsu, this was her first boat trip, first-ever look at the sea. And yet, to keep him from seeing her, she had to stay holed up in her cabin. Which might actually have helped her seasickness. Her stomach was empty, she felt almost as good as new. She could go for days like this, easily. She’d been through far worse experiences. She once hid out in a cave for nearly a month with next to no supplies. Endured awful work conditions in a black-market factory. Survived solitary confinement in a forced labour camp.

  Persuaded that his presence on board might be a coincidence, nothing more, Li Xing wavered, perplexed, unsure whether to thank her lucky stars or curse them. When she first made up her mind to go to Japan, this was the last thing she thought might happen.

  Stepping away from the door, she went over to the porthole and leant to look out. Its back to the setting sun, the boat steamed steadily eastward. She didn’t realize that travelling east makes the days grow shorter, and wondered why it was getting dark so early. It gave her an uneasy feeling.

  A knock came at the door. Three faint taps, a pause, then two more. Their old signal. Back in the Broadway Mansions they’d used the doorbell. It was on hearing that signal that she’d scribbled in her notebook the words, “He’s come back to me.”

  Li Xing stole towards the sofa and sat down, holding her breath. Her pale throat was flushed and her heart throbbed. “He’s come back to me,” she murmured again in the back of her throat. “But not now, not now. It’s too soon.” Clutching her elbows, she buried her face in her crossed arms.

  Aki tried knocking on her door in the old way, and then left. He’d made up his mind beforehand to try it just once. The point being, beyond anything else, to convey his presence to her.

  He went out on deck on the side away from her porthole. The fishing boats that had been scattered among the waves at sundown had become in the deepening darkness a myriad lights. At first he mistook them for stars, then saw the stars above him. Yet the horizon was invisible, so that se
a and sky merged: fishing lights were stars, stars fishing lights. Each gave out a slim shaft of light that pierced the eye like an arrow.

  At some point, together with suspicion and disappointment, a sense of deep frustration came boiling up in him, as if she were now the enemy. What in God’s name was she doing married to Zhang Liang? Why go to such lengths to avoid him, Aki?

  Arms clasped behind his head, he lay in bed staring up moodily at the too-bright light on the ceiling. Then all at once he sprang up. “I’ve got it,” he said aloud. “This will be a brand-new romance!”

  The key was not to see it as the continuation of something now five years old. His new love was Li Yan, a woman who merely happened to look like the actress Li Xing. To pursue her under the misguided assumption that she was an old flame of his would be a mistake. She was – had always been – Li Yan, the consul’s wife. One chance shipboard encounter and he was smitten. Love at first sight. Just like that time with Li Xing in Studio Four. Granted, it was wrong to be falling for another man’s wife, but love knows no boundaries, doesn’t it?

  He bent over the table next to the sofa and wrote out one sweet declaration of love after another on the ship’s stationery. From the moment I first saw you, I lost my heart… He resisted the impulse to let the dam burst and spill out his true feelings, instead forcing himself to remember the days when he was a lovesick college student writing letters like this. But there was one important point he was careful to include: I’ll be waiting for you on 16th January in the lobby of Hotel Anaga on Awaji Island. He also gave instructions on how to get there. He added a simple map showing the way.

  He chose 16th January for their tryst because on that day only, in the town of Fukura, there would be a traditional outdoor performance of the Awaji puppet theatre. He had already bought two tickets, one for his sister. She’d have to take a rain check. He specified the Hotel Anaga because it was close to the town and also because he hoped possibly to be able to see the “green flash” from there.

  He didn’t know the telephone number of the hotel, but neither did he put down his own number. Let her come or not come. Better not to know which it was to be until the day arrived. It was a gamble.

  He wrote: Tomorrow morning, just after seven, please look out your window. Awaji is the second largest of Japan’s smaller islands, located in Osaka Bay. It will appear very close. We’ll go right by it, not a kilometre away. That’s where the Hotel Anaga is and where the puppet theatre is performed.

  Quietly he slid the letter under the door of cabin A7, then went back to his room and put on his pyjamas. From now on, he decided, he would sleep with the top button unbuttoned. He set the alarm on his wristwatch for six and went straight to sleep.

  Next morning, heavy clouds hung low over the Kii Channel, as if last night’s starry sky had never happened. No sign of the Kii Peninsula or Shikoku in the distance, let alone of Awaji Island under their noses.

  The Xin Jian Zhen docked at Wharf No. 4 in Kobe Harbour at nine in the morning, but the paperwork for the student workers took so long that no one was allowed to disembark for some time. The woman who’d come to have her teeth fixed developed a heart problem and was carried out to a waiting ambulance on a stretcher. As the siren receded into the distance, finally the announcement came: “All passengers, please disembark!”

  Li Xing finished getting ready and looked out through the porthole at Japan in the rain. The most refined country in Asia appeared as a blurred and shapeless mass. The streets, the buildings, and the water were a muddy grey, the mountains a muddy purple. She entrusted her suitcase to the cabin attendant and descended the gangplank.

  From behind his porthole curtain, Aki watched as the consul’s lovely wife left the ship wearing a fur coat and hat. Hungrily, his eyes followed her every move. The consul himself would surely be waiting to pick her up, somewhere on the pier or in Immigration. He lingered in his cabin till the last minute.

  By the time he cleared Immigration, the big room was deserted. He rode alone up the long escalator and hailed a taxi, going straight to Shin-Kobe Station and hopping on a bullet train. By nightfall he was back in Tokyo.

  25

  From 30th December to 3rd January, Mitsuru went to the resort of Akakura with five friends from work and skied till she could ski no more. The 5th of January, the first day of work in the new year, was a Thursday; after putting in another full day on Friday she had the weekend to relax, so she was able to bounce back quickly from the exhaustion of skiing. On Sunday afternoon she prepared potato salad and sweet inari rice balls to take to her mother. On the way, she picked up a jar of stewed figs and rosehip blancmange. All were favourites of Yasuko, who lately had stopped eating flower petals.

  Her car, a dark blue Mini Cooper, climbed the steep hills of Mikage with ease. The car stereo was playing a Mozart string quartet. The day before yesterday, having heard of a new CD by the Alban Berg Quartet, she’d stopped off on the way home from work to purchase it for her mother. It contained the “Haydn Set,” six pieces dedicated to Haydn. Yasuko loved them, and her appreciation had been passed to both her children.

  “We’re feeling rather cross today, I’m afraid,” warned Nurse Sakiyama. Single and middle-aged, with a honeycomb of wrinkles on her forehead, she’d been looking after Yasuko for three years now. “But I’m sure she’ll cheer up when she sees you. Mrs Tachibana, your daughter’s here,” she called, opening the door and poking her head into the room. “Oh, she’s asleep. Well, come on in.”

  Mitsuru turned sideways and slipped through the half-open door, taking care not to bang the paper bags she was carrying.

  Nurse Sakiyama straightened the foot of the bed. She looked at the bouquet of roses that Mitsuru had brought, comparing them with a vase of freesias on the sill of the bay window. “Those I just arranged yesterday, so why don’t I go get another vase?” she said, and left the room.

  The yellow flannel curtains were closed. Mitsuru put her various gifts on the coffee table and went over to her mother, who was sleeping with her right cheek on the pillow, snoring softly. It sounded like someone blowing into an empty bottle. The nurse returned with a slender-necked Czech crystal vase, already filled with water. Mitsuru quickly trimmed the leaves and stems and arranged the half-dozen roses in the vase. This she put on a shelf by the head of the bed, the glow from the flowers lighting up her own face as she did so.

  “I brought some rice balls and other things,” she said. “Would it be okay if I gave her those for supper?”

  “Certainly. Then I won’t take her to the dining room, I’ll just bring a tray in here.”

  “That’d be nice. Thank you,” said Mitsuru, with the polite bow she had learnt from her mother.

  Mitsuru opened the curtains and inserted a disc in her mother’s CD player, beside the vase of freesias. The volume was turned way down. Shortly after the performance began, Yasuko stopped snoring. Mitsuru bent down over her face to listen, but the old woman’s breathing was quiet; all she could hear was the rumbling of her belly.

  She made a pot of tea and laid out some paper plates on the coffee table for supper. All the while Mozart filled the air, as the sun outside crept lower in the sky.

  She felt her mother stir, and turned around to find her lying with her eyes open, staring out the window. “Well, you had a nice nap,” she said.

  “Did you bring me this music?”

  “Yes. Happy New Year, Mom.”

  “That’s right, it’s the New Year. What year is it now?”

  “1995.”

  “Not the Western count—”

  “Heisei 7, then.”

  “Not Heisei, either. I can’t understand unless you use Showa.”

  “Showa 70.” That era had ended in 1989 with the death of the emperor Showa, but her mother never had adjusted to a new emperor and a new name for his reign.

  “Thank you. How old are you now?”

  Mitsuru smiled and said nothing. Her mother lifted her head slightly and peered over at the coffee t
able.

  “I brought some of your favourites, Mom. Rice balls and potato salad. Made them myself.”

  “Thank you. What’s in that jar?”

  “Stewed figs.”

  “I’ll have some of that.”

  Mitsuru quickly pulled out the wheelchair, set it beside the bed, and raised her to a sitting position. She then put a sweater around her mother’s shoulders and half-lifted her out of bed, helping her into the wheelchair.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You’re not? Your stomach was gurgling just now.”

  “Was it?” she asked in evident embarrassment. She ate two inari rice balls before reaching for the figs. “These are good.”

  “You used to make them for me all the time.”

  The shadow of a smile crossed Yasuko’s face; then her eyes wandered back to the window. “Now who do you suppose that might be?”

  Mitsuru saw no one. “I don’t know,” she said, and put on the second CD.

  “Who’s playing?”

  “The Alban Berg Quartet.”

  “We used to have a recording by the Juilliard String Quartet. What became of it, I don’t know. Toward the end of the Andante in D minor, it had a scratch and the needle would skip over about two seconds of the music. I don’t know how the scratch got there, but it was quite noticeable. I didn’t scratch it, mind you. But that’s neither here nor there.” She paused, then asked, “Whatever happened to that record? Do you know? You there.”

  “It’s Mitsuru.”

  “Yes, you.”

  “Mitsuru, Mom.”

  “You… It’s not my fault your father died, you know.”

  Mitsuru nodded, looked down, and fiddled with her watch for a moment.

  “Why are you looking at me that way?”

  But Mitsuru wasn’t looking at her mother, and she knew that her mother wasn’t looking at her, either.

  Nurse Sakiyama returned with supper on a tray. She placed it on the wheeled table beside the bed and pushed it over, approximately where the old woman’s blank gaze was fixed.