The Earthquake Bird

by Susanna Jones

  * * *

  I used to take the Yamanote line to any station, then follow the tracks to the next one, or farther. That was how I came to be in Shinjuku the night I met Teiji. I would not have said that I was lonely in those days—I never felt lonely—and yet when I saw Teiji there, silent and studious, I could not bear to walk away from him and be alone again.

  We had silent conversations with invisible gestures. We walked around the streets together. We hung out in his uncle’s noodle shop. While Teiji was serving customers or taking out the rubbish, I read the novels of Mishima and Soseki Natsume, The Tale of Genji. Where the Japanese was too difficult, I used a translated text to help me. I wrote new kanji in a notebook, practiced the form until I knew the stroke order as well as I knew how to write Lucy Fly.

  We spent whole weekends in bed. But our favorite thing was to go out in the rain on a warm night. And here are conversations I know we had. Teiji taught me the Japanese adverbs to describe different types of rainfall, the kinds of words that don’t always show up in a Japanese-English dictionary. Potsu potsu is fine, spitting rain. Zaa zaa is a downpour. In my memories of the time I spent with Teiji, it always seems to be the rainy season.

  The nights have become jumbled in my mind and maybe I am confusing them, but what I remember is this.

  I am lying on the floor looking up at Teiji’s ceiling. Teiji slips into the room and grabs my hand.

  “It’s raining. We can’t stay indoors. Come on.”

  He pulls me out into the street. I am laughing (I am). He is wearing cut-off jeans and flip-flops. I can’t picture my own clothes but I know my feet are bare. We splash through puddles and follow the shiny pavements from one road to the next. On the main highway car tires screech, crowds push forward with umbrellas. On a smaller street we can hear each raindrop land in its destination, a leaf, a windowsill, a flower petal, potsu potsu.

  We race each other, kicking up dirty water, to the railway bridge. In the shelter of the Yamanote and Chuo lines, we lean against the concrete wall and wait for a train to pass over our heads. Since the Yamanote trains go at intervals of three minutes or so, we don’t need to be patient. I kiss Teiji, holding him so tightly that drops of water squeeze from our T-shirts. He touches his nose softly against mine and smiles. I let my tongue touch his teeth, crooked pearls which I love. When the Shibuya-bound train rattles over our heads a thrill runs from the tip of my nose down to the backs of my knees. It is quiet again. Teiji unhooks my bra and slips it out through the sleeve of my T-shirt with a flickering smile. Abracadabra. His forehead pushes my T-shirt higher so his hair is brushing my skin. He kisses my nipples with rainy lips and when the next trainful of commuters runs over our heads, we are fucking. The rough concrete wall makes pink and white lines on my back and tugs hard at the ends of my hair.

  Recently, I have tortured myself by standing under railway bridges, making myself shiver when a train passes. Then I weep because Teiji’s smile and Teiji’s body are not there and because I’m so stupid. Then I cry more because my sobs are echoing and returning to me, showing me how foolish I am. And I cry for Lily too.

  “No hobbies at all?” Oguchi gives me a look that is almost a cry.

  “None. I don’t need hobbies. That doesn’t make me a murderer, though.”

  He is flustered, clears his throat, says nothing.

  They stand up together and leave the room. I am promised that they will be back later, with reinforcements, to get some sense out of me. When the door is safely locked behind them, I sink from my chair to the floor, crawl to the corner of the room, and crouch against the wall. Then I cry for Lily.

  6

  Sachi was in the middle of the photograph box and Lucy was at the top. I knew my place and it was a better one than hers. It was the best position of all. I didn’t consider myself jealous, not in the sense that I thought Teiji still loved Sachi. But I couldn’t get rid of her. I was terrified of the day that my photographs would be replaced by a layer of new ones, of the next person or object. I imagined myself spinning off into darkness, nothingness, like Sachi. I wondered what had become of her, what was the point of those bleak parties where she came to look unhappier, sicker. I wrote many stories in my head and soon began to think of her as someone I had always known, a sister even.

  The story told by Teiji’s photographs was this. There was a young man who sometimes came into the noodle shop for a cheap meal before going to some small theater. He loved plays and dance so much that he couldn’t bear to spend his evenings anywhere else. He went as often as he could afford tickets and to all kinds of shows. The theater made him weep. At the sight of the actors or dancers entering the lights as the play started, his tear ducts moistened and his nose stung. Best of all were the white-faced dancers of butoh. Their gestures, aggressive and erotic, touched him deep inside, set his legs quivering. He liked musicals too—whether danced, roller-skated, or performed on ice—and the happier the songs, the harder he cried. He could soak three or four handkerchiefs in an evening watching the spectacular song and dance numbers of the all-female Takarazuka.

  When Teiji saw him in the restaurant, the crying man was always nervous, a little tense, like someone killing time before an interview or exam. He would tell Teiji of the play he was to see and sometimes, choked with sobs, talked of the previous night’s theatrical adventure.

  Teiji took a few photographs of this man, but couldn’t be satisfied. The crying man looked rigid and ordinary, even when red-eyed. He allowed Teiji to take the pictures but said, “You don’t want to take photographs of me. You should go to the theater. There’s nothing interesting about my life. I’m the audience. Nothing’s ever happened to me, or ever will. That’s why I go to watch. It’s not that I dream of being an actor, you see. That’s a mistake a lot of people make. My role is to be in the audience and my duty is to do it well. I want to be watching the performers. There is nothing for you to photograph.”

  Teiji became curious about the theater, this part of the city he had never met. He went to a little-known venue one night to see a play. He thought there would be new images to photograph and so there were. The play was a one-woman show starring a student actress. When she stepped out onto the lonely stage in her brown military uniform that he didn’t recognize from any army, Teiji knew that he needed to catch her in his camera. Her face was young and a little soft but she shouted with the aggression and ugliness of a middle-aged man. From the back of the audience Teiji took her picture, just one. When the play was almost over he slipped out to wait for her beside the stage door. She was alone. He looked at her through the lens and when she saw him she smiled. To be photographed by every newspaper and magazine in Japan was her aim. This was a start. They went to a bar near the theater and stayed all night.

  Off the stage she was sullen and unhappy but glad, at least, to be with Teiji. He didn’t require her to perform, even to speak. He was fascinated by what she was, the image she left in his eyes. Sachi trusted him. Then, as she grew weaker, she came to need him.

  He went to the theater between shifts at work. When he couldn’t go to performances he settled for rehearsals. In different theaters and different plays he saw her as a princess, a secretary, a concubine. She strutted in a costume made of peacock feathers, danced on her toes in a black leotard. He didn’t much care to follow the plots of the dramas and rarely remembered the story. Often he didn’t notice that there was a story. He was excited only by the sight of Sachi, her costume, voice, and face, the gestures she used. After performances and rehearsals Teiji met her outside the stage door, or in some coffee shop or bar near the theater. Sachi chain-smoked and they would sit together behind a gauze of cigarette smoke. She laughed and cried alternately, sometimes with a hacking cough. She didn’t care for the world of theater but didn’t belong in any other. They went to parties where she drank too much and cried in the bathroom. She didn’t like the people and was bad at party small talk, but couldn’t stop herself going. She had to be where the actors and actresses
were. Sometimes Teiji learned that after getting her home she’d called a taxi and returned to the party she’d hated so much. He thought she wanted to destroy herself. She stopped going to rehearsals, stopped getting up during the day and soon no director wanted to cast her. She was addicted to the parties she couldn’t bear and even Teiji couldn’t save her from them.

  And there the story was interrupted because Teiji had found me flicking through his pictures. But the final image continued to haunt me. Sachi lying on the pavement. It could have been an overdose, drunkenness, sleep, or death. I didn’t ask Teiji about Sachi again. And of course, I know nothing of the crying man. I made it up. Perhaps he never went to the theater in his life. It could have been that his noodles were too hot, and so his eyes were red and moist in the photograph I saw.

  I thought of going to the theater to find Sachi, but how would I know which one? I could scour an entertainment magazine to find out what was on and where, but it was risky. A theater is a dangerous place for Lucy. I can’t watch a play without believing I am in it, or even that I am it. As a child I went on occasional school trips to see Shakespeare, or a pantomime, never anything between. I dreaded the plays in the same way that I sometimes feared sleep. I would be sucked into a nightmare and might never wake up. And yet, once I was there, waiting on my velvet folding seat for the lights to go down, I became involved in the drama with the embracing passion of a schoolgirl. I scarcely breathed until the lights came up, such was my concentration. The concept of invited audience participation has always struck Lucy as bizarre. I was participating. I was every character, and the place and plot too. Whether I was Falstaff or a babe in the wood, whether I was a murder or a mystery, I lived it to the full. I was both Titania and Oberon, Demetrius and Lysander, Puck and Flute the bellows mender. I was Wall and Moonlight. I was also Snow White and all the Seven Dwarves. I was the skull of Yorick and I was a very sharp rapier. When the curtain came down, I couldn’t bear to leave and yet I wanted to. A teacher would drag me along the aisle and toward the minibus. I kicked and screamed, lost fingernails and hair to the theater. It was a kind of madness because it made no difference whether I stayed in the theater or whether I returned home to my bedroom. I would be stuck inside the play for weeks and months, living it again and again, changing and developing it each day obsessively and against my will. People around me were barely visible, hardly audible. Then, as I emerged from the frenzy, I would enjoy the calm and await the next trip with terror.

  I’m not forced to visit theaters anymore, so I don’t. Such a loss of self-control would be intolerable; I would never be able to concentrate on my translations. No, I couldn’t look for Sachi in a theater. Besides, according to the photographs, she was no longer there. She wasn’t anywhere.

  I went, after Lily’s death, to a pond near my apartment. I looked for Teiji’s reflection in the water. I wanted him to teach me words of comfort but I found only turtles and carp. I was drunk. I was off food at the time and so I’d had gin for breakfast. It’s a pleasant way to begin the day. Before the glass was empty I felt as if the day had been dealt with, was out of my hands, and I was free to do whatever I liked. I wandered past the reeds and waterlilies, unable to focus my eyes. A profusion of color—corn-blue sky, green-headed ducks, a scarlet wooden bridge—throbbed hazily. A shrine stood beside the pond and I wondered whether or not it would be all right to clap my hands before it and say a prayer for Lily and Teiji. I decided it was probably best not to pray when drunk, and went to watch the carp swimming.

  On a bench in front of me a young man stretched out in the sun. He might have been a runner, for he wore baggy shorts and his top was bare. He had brown skin and long black hair that fell over the end of the bench in a single ponytail. His chest glistened in the light, rising and falling gently as he breathed. The reeds behind him swayed slightly and flies buzzed around. The whole place seemed to breathe with him, as if each breath he took filled the earth’s lungs. I stared beyond him, at the water and the wooden shrine, but all I saw was that thick black hair, curved eyelids, glinting brown skin.

  I sat on the ground, among swollen pink azaleas, and shut my eyes while the earth tilted and swayed like the deck of a ship. I wanted Teiji so badly, to touch his skin, but I would never, ever see him again. When I threw up, a couple of hours later, I blamed it not on alcohol but on seasickness.

  7

  The noodle shop was crowded. As always, most of the customers were men. Businessmen, young and old, students. There were just a few women, sitting in pairs or alone, facing the wall. Through the window I could almost smell the food, the chopped spring onions, the small pieces of meat, the barley tea. I pushed the door open and entered with Lily close behind. The toe of her shoe clipped my heel twice as we walked. I wished she would step out beside me but I knew she liked to hide. She’d done the same thing when we were apartment-hunting, pushing me into the firing line and cowering in my shadow. I searched for Teiji’s face but could not see him. His uncle nodded at me from behind the counter. It wasn’t a look of open hostility but I knew he was suspicious. He always looked straight into my eyes for a couple of seconds then averted his stare to some stain on the floor, or the back of a chair. I thought it was a sad look, but I didn’t know why he should be sad. I wondered what he had thought of Sachi, the strange actress.

  I said, “Konnichiwa,” in a cheery voice and led Lily past him to the only empty table. Once we were seated I realized that I had my back to the kitchen. This was no good because I would not be able to look out for Teiji, to thrill at a glimpse of his muscles as he wiped a surface or opened a cupboard before seeing me and coming to join us. I was about to ask Lily to change places but before my mouth was open I sensed Teiji’s presence close behind me. It was a kind of warmth, a pull, and I leaned back in my chair to let my head touch his chest, like one magnet snapping onto another. Lily looked up, beyond my head and back at me. I couldn’t tell what she thought of him, though she seemed a little shy. She waited for me to speak. Lily was the first friend I’d introduced to Teiji. It gave me an odd feeling of sharing a deeply personal secret. I confess, I wanted her to like him.

  “This is Teiji,” I said, still not looking.

  “’Ello.”

  Teiji greeted her, brushed my hair with his fingertips. He went back into the kitchen, promising to join us in a moment.

  “He’s very cute,” Lily whispered with an encouraging nod. Cute. It was close to insulting but she intended it as a compliment so I forgave her. I wanted Lily to like Teiji but I had not expected her to understand him. Teiji’s world was too distant from hers.

  He appeared again with two hot bowls of noodles and placed them on the table. His camera was around his neck, hanging by its old leather strap. I was sure it hadn’t been there when he stood behind me. I plucked disposable chopsticks from the pot on the table but Teiji put his hand around mine and steered it back. He disappeared, then came back with lacquer chopsticks that, I guessed, he and his uncle used. Teiji once told me that they ate together most evenings. Sometimes it was midnight before they were both free to sit at the table, but still one would wait for the other, however hungry he felt. Teiji’s uncle liked to talk about things he’d noticed during the day, a bird on the windowsill, a customer’s gold tooth. Teiji would listen and eat.

  “Wow. We’re getting the posh treatment.” Lily picked up the chopsticks and peered at them as if they were made of ivory. I am still finding it difficult to remember Teiji’s words and so I will recount what I believe he may, or must, have said that day.

  “Enjoy your noodles. I’ll come and talk to you when I can but I have to serve these customers first.”

  Lily poked the noodles around the bowl. She knew how to hold her chopsticks but not how to grip slippery food. I was glad because her concentration rendered her silent for at least twenty minutes and so I was allowed to let my thoughts wander while I slurped from my own bowl. I turned every now and then to see what Teiji was doing. He moved around the shop clearing t
ables, wiping them. Although he performed each task efficiently, his thoughts were clearly elsewhere. His eyes were full of something that was not tables or damp cloths. I hoped it was me but it was hard to tell. I finished my noodles and watched Lily as she fought her way toward the bottom of her bowl. We were startled by a flash and both turned at the same time. Of course, I should have known by then. I should have known exactly what it was and not even blinked.

  Teiji had captured us in his lens. Snap. He smiled, turned, and went back to clearing tables. He had taken a photograph of Lily and me together. He gave it to me a couple of weeks later. He’d wrapped it in a piece of carefully folded newspaper. I kept that too. I read both sides of it again and again to decipher some message of love. On one side was an article about the recent rise in domestic abuse, on the other were that day’s foreign exchange rates. I could make a link, if I tried, but I knew none was intended. Still, it had been folded by Teiji’s dextrous hands, for me. I was glad that he hadn’t made a copy of the photograph for Lily. That meant that it was intended as a picture of me with Lily as an extra, not a picture of the two of us as equals. I was ashamed of my delight in such a childish triumph, but not enough to make me change that feeling. Nor was my shame sufficient to lead me to the photography shop and have it copied for Lily, though I knew even then that she would have liked it. I still have that picture, in a box where I put things that I don’t want to keep but cannot throw away.

  It seems to Lucy now that the photograph marks the start of the trouble. I could look at the picture and think, this is the moment where it went wrong, the point at which it was already too late. Before the shutter clicked. After the shutter clicked. A split second in between when a seismic shift occurred that could not be felt on the earth’s crust. It would eventually result in an earthquake so huge that it couldn’t be measured on either the Richter scale or the Japanese earthquake scale. In fact the photograph shows nothing but Lily and Lucy sitting at a table; it was the taking of the photograph, not the image it stole, that started the rumbling. And I don’t have a photograph of the photograph being taken. Yet the picture shows what was happening in the moment it was taken and so it has become a representation of itself. I should have understood this at the time.