Jasmine

by Noboru Tsujihara

  The next morning, he skipped two meetings and took the first bullet train out of Tokyo. At a time like this, meeting in Kyoto didn’t seem like the best idea, but it was the only place that came to mind. Going to Kobe would take too long. Soon enough, they would have to talk things over with Xu Liping, but they could think about that later.

  The sun was already high in the sky, but little sunshine filtered through to the path in the wooded valley. They stopped to rest. Looking back, they could just glimpse the city between the slopes of mountains. They were facing in the direction of Shimogamo Shrine and the woods of the Kyoto Prefectural Botanical Garden; beyond lay the Zen temple Daitoku-ji and the Kinugasa district. Off in the distance, the ridgeline of Mount Atago stood out sharp and clear, the snow on the mountainside and in the villages showing signs of melting. They made their way up to the temple called Tanukidani Fudo-in.

  “Is this willow-cotton?” she asked, holding out her palm.

  “It’s snow.”

  “But the sun’s shining!”

  “They called it kazahana, ‘wind flowers.’ Snow out of a clear sky.” Aki turned his head and looked off to the right. “This mountain connects with Mount Hiei in the north. Must be snowing there. The wind’s carrying it down to the city.”

  Li Xing tried to catch the wind flowers on her hand, but the moment they landed they melted away.

  “In Mandarin it’s qinxue. ‘Pure snow.’”

  “Nice. Do you suppose willow-cotton is blowing now in Beijing?” In early spring, bits of willow seed drifted in the air like wispy cotton.

  “Not quite yet. Not till after the spring festival.”

  They faced forward again and began climbing the twisting path. Li Xing continued her résumé of the document she’d read. Aki listened closely.

  As they went higher, with steep slopes closing in on either side, the steady narrowing of the path induced a sense of commitment. Presumably, a climb like this served to strengthen a pilgrim’s resolution. At the window by the temple entrance, Aki wrote on a slip of paper, “In thanks for our reunion,” and made a ten-thousand-yen donation before heading into the main hall where they knelt in front of the statue of Fudo Myoo; soon, five or six monks appeared and began offering incense and chanting prayers.

  Outside again, they made their way back down steps that were the start of their descent. Aki had been thinking: Apparently neither Zhang nor his archaeologist friend in Xinjiang has a clear idea of where the ODA money went. Although it’s clearly missing. Even if they do prove Cai’s a Uyghur, so what? I doubt they have enough of a case to arrest him. Still, once it comes out that a high ministry official has got forged identity papers, there’ll have to be a court of inquiry. That’s what Zhang is betting on. That’s when he’ll try to pick up the money trail.

  “If Cai goes before an official court of inquiry, he’s doomed,” Li Xing said.

  “You know, the profile itself may have been real, but I’m not so sure about the rest of it – the plan for bringing Cai down, the web of connections in the Party and the ministry. That could all be camouflage. Zhang planted the thing there on purpose for you to see, after all. I’ll bet somewhere there’s a different scheme.”

  “Maybe so, but all I can do is tell Cai everything I found. Even if you’re right and it does turn out to be a plant, he’ll see through it. Staying one step ahead of Zhang shouldn’t be hard for him. Let’s face it, he’s the one who taught Zhang his trade.”

  Aki had reserved a room in the Miyako Hotel, but as he listened to this he began to think they ought to go and consult Xu Liping right away – not just about Cai, but about what Li Xing’s own strategy should be.

  “So many things are going on,” said Aki, once they were down on the street and inside a taxi. “Something rather funny happened yesterday, for instance. A detective came to see me. Asked me all kinds of questions – or rather, got me asking him questions – about Zhang Liang. Seems he’s gone beyond his usual role as consul, setting up his own spy ring, giving orders to illegal operatives. I have to say I was impressed; Japanese security isn’t lying down on the job. Still, it’s probably nothing like the old days… Anyway, I thought this detective was spying on Zhang, but it turned out he’s spying on me. Weird. Not twenty-four hour surveillance, though. It seems every time I write something or make a statement at a council meeting, file a report, take a trip to China or the US, he’s there, checking on it. His biggest concern is my contact with Zhang. He doesn’t know about my acquittal, or about that last trip to Shanghai, either. You know what’s even funnier? He said they used to spy on my father, too. Said one of his predecessors, the third to last, had that assignment.”

  This made Li Xing laugh a little. “Who knows? Maybe this man’s the son of whoever was assigned to your father.”

  “Right.” Aki laughed out loud.

  In Suwayama the electricity was working, but not the gas or water. Li Xing ran over to her grandmother and pressed her cheek against her face as she sat in her wheelchair.

  “Thanks to Chen, we old folks managed to scrape through. We’re grateful,” said Xu.

  Chen had fitted right into the household. He carried up water for the old couple, fixed their meals, did their laundry, helped Xu bathe his wife. He did more, too, organizing a motorcycle brigade that delivered relief supplies where needed.

  Briefly, Li Xing gave her grandfather a two-part report, describing first the contents of the document on Cai Fang, and then the attitude Zhang had assumed towards her. She spoke simply, without emotion, until she came to the final thing he’d said to her. Shakily, she repeated the words: Nothing. Nothing is going to change.

  They could hear the gentle pop, pop of the percolator as Chen made coffee somewhere in the background.

  Xu said simply that Li Xing wasn’t to go back to Osaka. “Everything will be all right,” he told her confidently. “Leave the details to me, though I fear there’s nothing I can do for Cai Fang. He’ll have to deal with the situation on his own. But make sure you tell him everything you’ve committed to memory.”

  She picked up the phone and called Beijing. Cai was in his office at the ministry.

  “Li Xing – are you okay? Where are you calling from?”

  “My grandfather’s house in Kobe.”

  “Ah, not from your home phone, then. What happened in Kobe is awful. Are your laoye and the rest of the family all right?”

  “Yes, we’re all fine. Look, I have to tell you about a report Zhang Liang received about you that I—”

  “Wait. Give me the number you’re calling from. I’ll go to another room. Call you back in five minutes.”

  Precisely five minutes later, Cai called back. He listened to her account, said he understood, said he would take appropriate steps. The news wasn’t unexpected. “By the way, how is he?” he added.

  “Fine,” Li Xing answered in a cheerful tone, quickly understanding that he meant Aki.

  “That’s good. I’d like you to give him a message.”

  “He’s here right now. Shall I put him on?”

  “By all means.”

  She handed Aki the receiver, which he accepted with little enthusiasm. He never liked taking over the phone from someone else, or having another person suddenly come on the line.

  “It’s certainly been a while since we’ve spoken, hasn’t it?” Cai went on, “I found out about your father. He’s alive. I can’t go into any details over the phone, so come to Beijing as soon as you can. As you know, I no longer have much time at my disposal. Get your visa in Tokyo. Better to avoid Osaka, for obvious reasons. I’ll arrange with the Tokyo embassy to have the visa issued immediately.”

  “Where is my father?”

  “On the Loess Plateau. I’ll take you there. Here’s how to reach me. The phone number is…”

  The large, Western-style room had small, low windows on the east and south, fitted with shutters on the outside and paper screens on the inside. When Li Xing’s mother went to China, the Xu family was still
living in the old Graciani house in Kobe, and they kept her room there unchanged. After they built the new condominium structure in Suwayama and went to live there, an exact replica of their daughter’s room was incorporated into it at the insistence of her mother. The missing girl never did return – but her child, their granddaughter, did. On the night of the earthquake, after walking all the way from Ashiya with Aki leading the way, Li Xing had slept in her mother’s room.

  She and Aki now climbed into the lone bed in that room.

  “At last that report of Zhang’s is off my mind.”

  “Yes, you can let it go.”

  “Okay, here it goes… whoosh! Ah, yes, much better.”

  “That’s the way. Now forget Zhang, too.”

  “Can forgetting make it seem as if it never happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “But what if he doesn’t forget? Then it won’t work.”

  “Whether he does or does not makes no difference. It never happened. Just let it go. Then everything will be suan le – over and done with.” But his voice was strained.

  “Laoye said to leave Zhang to him…”

  Aki was silent, his mind busy formulating a strategy for dealing with the man by himself. The information supplied by that detective would be useful. Casually let the guy know he had the goods on his illegal spying activities. Remember to tell Xu as well…

  His hands reached for her, and one by one he undid the buttons on her pyjama top. “To tell the truth, I’d forgotten about my father. But they remembered for me.”

  “You’ll have to go to Beijing, won’t you? I hope Cai Fang will be all right.”

  She shifted her hips. Aki lifted the blanket high and said,

  Beloved, you and I are a compass.

  Two heads, four legs, one body.

  Now we describe a circle around a point,

  Head to legs and legs to head,

  Each with head between the other’s legs.

  “That’s no kind of a poem!”

  “At least it’s accurate.”

  “People in liberated China don’t do this.”

  “No? But you and I did, from the start.”

  “Ah,” said Li Xing softly, and then she said it again in a different way.

  33

  Chauffeured by Chen, Xu set off for Mikage. On his way up the hill he stopped at the nursing home to see Yasuko, but it wasn’t clear to him whether she understood who he was. It was sad, he thought, gently touching her arm. Since she didn’t even know that her daughter was dead, telling her that her husband was alive seemed meaningless. All he could do for her now was to help her son straighten out his life.

  His own wife was in little better shape. How well did she grasp the fact that their granddaughter had come to them? Who could say? This, too, was sad, and yet Xu was rather inclined to see it as providential in its way. For the sake of Yasuko – whom he’d once asked to marry him, back in his university days – he would help Aki, her son, to sort things out. That was also the best way to help Li Xing.

  After spending barely half an hour with Yasuko, he walked uphill the short distance to the Garden Oriental Soshuen, having told Chen to wait for him in the parking lot.

  The large Chinese-style garden, constructed on a swath of wooded hillside, enclosed a building in the classic residential style of the Japanese nobility and a scattering of small pavilions. Originally built by the founder of a major Kansai-based insurance company as a second home, after the Pacific War it had been bought by the Lin family, Chinese residents of Kobe, who turned it into a first-class restaurant specializing in Cantonese food. Thirty years ago, if you were lucky, in the main dining room or bar you might have shaken hands with the writer Mishima Yukio or seen the actress Arima Ineko drift in like a stray peach blossom.

  The day after the earthquake, Soshuen already had its lights on, open for business. In part this was because the premises escaped with only minor damage. Beyond that, though, the owners had been inspired by something that once happened in China. When the Qiantang River massively overflowed its banks and poured through the streets of Hangzhou, it seems that the restaurant Louwailou at the foot of Mount Gu had continued service on its third floor, lighting the rooms with every available candle. The specialty of the house was slow-braised pork belly, which the citizens of Hangzhou were not about to deny themselves, come hell or high water; so they got into boats and rowed through the flooded streets to eat their pork.

  For similar reasons, the luxury Hotel Okura in Kobe, on the harbourfront by Meriken Park, had put lights in its windows to spell out the message “business as usual.”

  Xu had chosen Soshuen for a meeting with Zhang Liang. He intended to probe the man’s mind and, as soon as he could, come to an on-the-spot agreement.

  Zhang, meanwhile, was still recovering from his wife’s unexpected confession. If she were allied with him, he’d have been willing to take things slowly, leave them as they were for the time being. But shock had eventually given way to deep-seated anger and offense, confirming his intention to go through with his plans. News that Waki, the Huxley man, had been arrested in Shanghai in July 1989, then acquitted, was certainly interesting. Better than he could have dared hope for. Add to that an adulterous affair with the wife of the present Chinese consul and… I may not have power of life and death over him,but this still gives me the upper hand. I’ll take care of Waki once I finish off Cai Fang.

  Using the need to file a report on the earthquake as a pretext, Zhang had obtained the consul general’s permission for a trip to Beijing. However, just after making a plane reservation by phone, he’d received this summons from Xu Liping. Now, of all times. For a second he hesitated, considered the matter from every angle. In the end, he fastened on one consideration: Xu was his wife’s grandfather. With all due caution, why not take this opportunity to get closer to his adversary?

  When he arrived at the hotel, Xu was waiting for him, seated at a corner table in the dining room – the closest place to the garden. Sounds from outdoors wafted in, so there would be little chance of other customers overhearing their conversation. Not that they needed to worry: it was only days since the earthquake, and the large room held only two other parties, seated at distant tables.

  A heavy jar of darkly fragrant Shaoxing wine appeared on the table. Nothing else.

  “A fine old wine,” said Zhang in Japanese, taking a sip after it had been decanted into a jade cup.

  “It’s thirty-year-old Hua Tiao from Shaoxing,” said Xu, naming a traditional specialty, the oldest brewed wine in China. “Let me start out by saying there will be no food served tonight. This is not the sort of topic to discuss while eating.”

  Zhang nodded, thinking, Score one for him. Arranging the meeting here, then ruling out a meal, showed what a sly old fox he was.

  “I believe you said you’d never been here before,” continued Xu.

  “That’s right. It’s quite a place all right.”

  “Do you mind if we go on speaking Japanese? I may be Chinese, but my grasp of the language is fairly tenuous, I’m afraid.”

  “Certainly, by all means. Although I warn you, my Japanese isn’t that good, either.”

  “On the contrary, it’s excellent. Where did you learn it?”

  “The School of International Studies.”

  “Ah. Well, let’s get down to it… Cai Fang is not someone I’m acquainted with. What sort of person is he?” This opening gambit would get Zhang to open up.

  “He was a lecturer from the Ministry of State Security at the School of International Studies, which I entered after graduating.”

  “What sort of teacher was he?”

  “Strict… also nenggan, very capable. At the time, I was delighted to have him as a role model. Now the idea makes my blood boil. He and I were in the program for opposite reasons, you see. He was set on betraying his country! But I’m grateful to him for two things.”

  Silently, Xu refilled Zhang’s cup. As Cantonese custom demanded, Zhang ra
pped three times on the table with his middle finger before returning the favour.

  “First, as an instructor, he was excellent. I think it’s because he was already a traitor to his country, in the position of being a double spy, that he was able to do such a good job.”

  Xu nodded. Zhang Liang, he saw, was no run-of-the-mill, can’t-see-beyond-the-end-of-his-nose pragmatist.

  “The other thing is my wife. Whatever his motive in arranging the marriage, thanks to him I got to know an amazing woman. And to think she’s your granddaughter!”

  Without reacting, Xu studied the man’s darting eyes. Zhang faltered, dropped his gaze. Xu asked, “What’s the word in Mandarin for the husband of one’s granddaughter?”

  “Well, in this case, since I’m married to your daughter’s daughter, that would make me your waison nyude nyuxue.” He relaxed slightly.

  “Consul,” said Xu in a low, hoarse voice, as if he’d been waiting for this moment. “I’m a nobody, an insignificant member of the overseas Chinese community. From Beijing’s point of view, I probably seem about as unimportant as a leaf in the wind. As, indeed, I am.”

  What’s the old man getting at? wondered Zhang as he lifted his cup.

  “But the life of a leaf is surprisingly easy. It can be carried around by the prevailing wind, or it can fall to earth. Even if it rots there, it doesn’t smell.”

  More baffled than ever, Zhang began to feel irritated.

  “Look, it’s raining,” said Xu. “The leaves on the trees love it, getting wet in the rain.”

  The traditional Japanese building had been extensively remodelled when it was made into a restaurant; a row of arched windows had been put in and a lawn terrace added, with a roof supported by six untrimmed cypress pillars. Falling drops shone distinctly, each separate, in the light of the garden lanterns, and landed neatly on the grass. Only Xu noticed.

  He continued, “In the old days, my grandfather and my father served as the comprador for three banks – the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, Bangkok Bank, and the Yokohama Specie Bank, which is now the Bank of Tokyo. Are you familiar with the comprador system?”