The Earthquake Bird

by Susanna Jones

  “Where?”

  “It’s an island in the Japan Sea. I’ve always wanted to go there and now I’m going. Please come with me. It’s a beautiful place—I’ve read about it—with lots of temples and clear blue sea. Mrs. Katoh, my friend who played the viola, was from there and I’ve wanted to visit ever since. We could spend time in Niigata too, in the mountains, if you wanted to. You can’t leave Japan until you’ve been somewhere outside Tokyo, and that doesn’t include the piddly hill we climbed in Yamanashi.”

  “Well, when?”

  “A month from now. For a long weekend.”

  “Is it far?”

  “Yes, quite far. That’s why we’re going to go there. It’s far from Tokyo.”

  “It’s very tempting. Won’t you want to go with Teiji, though?”

  “I don’t know.” I really didn’t know. “I can’t imagine him outside Tokyo, but he might want to. Never mind that, what about you?”

  “I think I’d like to go. Yes, I would.”

  “That’s settled, then. No thoughts of leaving Japan for at least another month.”

  I replaced the receiver, pleased with myself.

  9

  Teiji, there’s something I’d like to do.” I pressed play on his CD player to set off the music he liked to listen to, electronic jazz. “I want to go to a party with you.”

  I didn’t like parties especially, though I enjoyed loud music and alcohol. In my student days I went to parties only to find men who would be drunk enough to sleep with me. I hated all the small talk in the kitchen and the line for the bathroom. I was bored by the tears and tantrums of the rejected, the needless waste of energy. Lucy went to parties with a clear purpose. It was simple enough. You won or you lost, and if you lost you tried again next time. My feelings hadn’t changed and I’d never felt inclined to go to parties in Tokyo particularly, but I thought Teiji might want to. He’d spent nights and nights at parties with Sachi.

  Teiji was at the kitchen sink, washing his only cup. It was pale green and chipped. He rinsed it carefully and turned to look at me, holding it in both hands as if it were something precious.

  “Or a club?” I was making myself nervous.

  “If you want to. We could go to a club tonight. What kind of place were you thinking of?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He laughed. “You should think of where you’re going before you suggest going there.”

  “I thought—There are places you used to go to.”

  He sighed, picked up a tea towel, and began to dry the cup. He didn’t speak for a moment, then walked over to where I knelt by the CD player.

  “With Sachi. I know. I don’t want to go to those places anymore. She’s not here and it would feel strange. Anyway, I don’t want to. If you’d like to go out then I’ve got an idea. I know a new jazz club not too far from here. One of our customers is always going. He says it’s small and cozy, a bit unusual.”

  “You never mentioned it before.”

  “I only heard about it a couple of days ago. I didn’t know you’d be interested.”

  “I am. It sounds good.”

  It was the first time Teiji and I had really planned to go somewhere together and it felt like a date. I don’t wear makeup and I don’t have nice clothes, but I glanced in the mirror before we left, smoothed down my hair, and gave my reflection a saucy wink.

  It didn’t matter how we looked. The place was so dark that once we were seated we could barely make out the other tables. The walls disappeared into blue-black shadows and, though the room was small, it was hard to see where it ended. The piano and sax played in a dim, dusty light. Though there couldn’t have been more than a few meters between us, the light made them seem far away. Their music was melancholic and caressing. It warmed me like a hot toddy, gave me the kind of feeling that makes my face settle into a smile before I even know I’m happy.

  Teiji’s skin shimmered in the light of our tiny candle, like the surface of ice melting, and I remembered our first meeting when he looked like water. The very thought turned me on with a sharp thrill. Teiji, my ice statue-man. I sipped my gin and savored the taste, the touch of the glass stalk between my fingers. My other hand went under the table, smoothed along Teiji’s trousers. I felt him go hard. I stroked gently and took another sip of gin. Teiji tilted his head toward me with a crooked smile, brushed his lips across my face, and kissed my cheek. He slid his fingertips into my jeans, into me, so that I sucked my tongue, and then we kissed, slipped off our cushioned chairs to the dark floor where Teiji lay on his back, raised his arms to welcome me, and I fucked him. The last of my gin spilled on his face and I licked it off with the plaintive music of the saxophone in my ears. In our dark corner no one noticed us, or cared to stop us. It almost seems that it was intended to be this way, that it was the whole point of the club’s darkness, the waiters’ invisible service. I admit, I half hoped we would be caught. I thought Sachi had gone, finally. I wanted the world to know that Teiji was mine.

  I still can’t find Teiji’s voice clearly in my head and so I have been approximating his language, but there are words that are never forgotten because they repeat themselves so vividly, so many times, after their utterance. The next morning Teiji said something with such clarity I can’t erase it from my memory. He was lying beside me when I awoke, watching me. The camera was not in sight.

  “You are a bit strange,” he said.

  Did he say it in English or Japanese? If it was English the word “strange” may not be so bad. In an individualistic society it could be taken as a compliment. But if he spoke to me in Japanese he probably said I was hen, which is not so nice. English or Japanese. The more I think the less I remember. And I doubted the notion that it is possible to be only a bit strange. Surely one is strange or one is not. The look on his face had worried me. He looked nervous, perhaps even afraid. I had no answer, in either language.

  Lucy had been told she was strange since she was about five years old. Being strange was normal for Lucy so she had no understanding of what strangeness was, or why she had it. But that morning she knew that she was going to lose Teiji. From his expression she knew that he didn’t feel as close to her as she had believed. She didn’t try to argue or disprove his opinion. Nor did she ask him what he meant. It could have been argued that Teiji was himself more than a little unconventional—wandering around in the night taking pictures of nothing and showing them to nobody, for instance—and he had no business calling the kettle black. But that didn’t occur to Lucy at the time because Teiji was simply Teiji. It was not a question of normality or strangeness. She could have laughed to see if he laughed too and it was all a joke. But it didn’t feel like a joke. She closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep.

  Much later she went home and didn’t go to his apartment the next night because she was afraid that he wouldn’t be there, or that he would call from his balcony and tell her to go away because she was being too strange down there.

  I made my plans for Sado Island and decided that I would see Teiji again when I returned, try to repair the damage I’d caused. There was a reason for Teiji’s observation, you see. His remark, “You are a bit strange,” came not from nowhere. He didn’t awaken in the early hours and suddenly realize that the woman beside him was disconcertingly original. Lucy prompted the remark herself, with a story she had told him the night before, when we returned from the jazz club feeling sexy but also rather seedy. It was this story, I believe, that caused Teiji to stay awake all night and stare at me while I, having thrown off my burden, slept like a baby. In the morning, when I awoke, he stared at me and said, “You are a bit strange,” and I didn’t understand what he meant.

  What I had chosen to share with him was my very first sexual encounter, Lucy’s first crunch into the apple. I told him because, when he lay beside me in bed, I thought of Sachi again and my theft of her secrets. I thought I could return some of the confidence I stole that evening with a disclosure of my own. I also believed that,
as he had the previous time I told him my stories, he would fall asleep and not hear a word.

  Lucy was even less attractive as a teenager than she is now, and with a more hostile audience to play to the boys didn’t follow her and she didn’t want them to. She was interested only in her cello and her secret languages. She came to accept that having a boyfriend was a thing some girls did, and some did not. In the same way, Lucy knew that wearing makeup and fashionable clothes was not her destiny.

  One Sunday afternoon, when Lizzie was sick in bed with hypochondria, Lucy found herself at the door of another classmate. The girl’s name was Caroline and Lucy had, she believes now, reason to knock on the door about a geography project.

  The geography teacher was always setting pointless tasks, such as calculating the amount of wheat needed to make enough bread to feed all of East Yorkshire. Lucy considered hers a poor education, parochial and irrelevant. They never taught her the map of the world, the names of the countries and what you would find if you visited. The only reason she knew her atlas so well, able to name the capital city of every country when she was thirteen, was that she put in hours of study at night. Other pupils in her class didn’t know the Isle of Wight from Australia yet gained high grades because they could correctly distinguish between four kinds of pig. Lucy learned the main cities, the small towns, the languages, the music of country after country, but refused to pay more than minimal attention to local agricultural issues as a matter of principle. She was satisfied with her self-education though a little perturbed to discover, many years later, that the atlas under her bed was an old one. Dreamy places such as Ceylon, Formosa, Persia, and Siam now went under different, less exotic names.

  She entered the house, following shy Caroline through the bacon-smelling hall to the back room. Caroline’s father walked in from the garden, greeted them with a hearty hello. He was foreign. In the small village of Lucy’s childhood, this was a most distinguishing feature. There were few foreigners around, and he was so casual about it. She had heard in the Co-op that he was Russian but when he came to Britain he took on an English name, Brian Church. Caroline always denied that he was anything but British, despite the giveaway of his accent. Lucy had read about Russia and believed that Brian Church’s real name was Boris Chekhov. She had sometimes heard him speaking in the local shops, a gravelly voice, a voice of spies and vodka. She would listen from the other side of the aisle in the Co-op as he talked with another shopper about the price of bread. She longed to hear him speak of Russia but he never did. So it was with excitement that she sat in his back room with her geography project under her arm, and returned his hello.

  He left the room immediately and Lucy’s eyes scoured the room for Russian dolls, ballet shoes, bearskins, anything.

  There is a gap in the story where Lucy cannot remember exactly what happened, but presumes she worked on the project with Caroline. They must have discussed wheat or corn, found something to write. Perhaps they drew a plan of a farm. But she knows what happened after that.

  She was upstairs on the landing, outside the bathroom. She had tried the door but found it locked. The toilet flushed and Caroline’s father came out, drying his hands on the sides of his trousers. He smiled through butter-yellow teeth and apologized. She took that moment to stare at him with her piercing eyes, into his pupils that were Russian and had seen another life and country.

  She wanted to see his life, to read it like a book.

  He looked back at her, puzzled. His heavy brow was furrowed and his lips tight. Beads of sweat began to gather just above his eyebrows. He followed her into the bathroom and with a few grunts, rid her of the virginity she had so long been saddled with. When Lucy left the house twenty minutes later, she was sore and had the shape of a tap embedded in her thigh, like a tattoo.

  For the next couple of weeks I thought I had become half Russian. I called myself Olga, secretly, and named the baby I believed was growing inside me Natasha. Those were fraught and exciting days. But Caroline didn’t come to school one morning and I learned that her father had set off to sea the previous afternoon in his canoe. He hadn’t bothered to paddle back again and his body had washed up on the shore in the evening. I went from being half Russian to being half dead. And there was no baby inside. There was nothing at all. When the incident was reported in the local newspapers, Lucy discovered that Brian Church had not come from Russia, but from the Netherlands.

  Teiji had one arm around my head as I told my story. He brushed his nose against my cheek so that the hairs on my skin tingled. When I reached the part about Brian Church’s suicide, he pulled away a little. I hardly noticed except that my face went cold. I wondered if perhaps I had said too much, but then I was asleep.

  * * *

  There was cool air between us the next day. He tried not to show I had shocked him, but I knew. He took a picture of me when we walked to the station in the afternoon, but it was not the same. The click of the shutter wasn’t a natural part of his movement, his usual unconscious action. He peered through the viewfinder, moved around preoccupied, frowned irritably, and then, resigned, took the picture.

  “Teiji,” I said. But I had no more words to follow. I didn’t know what I could say to him because I had no idea what he was thinking. It might have been that I was so young, that Brian Church was so old, that I drove a man to suicide, that I fucked a schoolfriend’s father, that Teiji couldn’t bear the fact that I’d ever slept with another man. He may have thought that, like Sachi, Brian Church belonged to the past and it was wrong to bring him back. Now there’d be no getting rid of him.

  Teiji fixed his brown, translucent eyes on my face, perhaps hoping for a reversal of the previous night, something to put my story back where I’d found it. But that was beyond Lucy’s control.

  10

  Sado Island is situated in the unlucky northeast and equally unlucky northwest, depending on where you are and who you are. In olden times, when Kyoto was the capital, anything northeast of the city could bring it bad luck, so that included Sado Island. I learned this fact from Mrs. Katoh who, leaving her husband and son behind on the island, had come to Tokyo in search of some good luck. The island, being located so unluckily, is fortified against the bad spirits by numerous temples. I thought about this often. Perhaps Mrs. Katoh’s relentless giggle was also fortification against badness. Or perhaps she started laughing when she first arrived in Tokyo, or when she found Mrs. Yamamoto and the house with wisteria over the door and music inside. But for me it was different. If you’re starting from Tokyo, Sado is in the north-west and this direction was more unlucky for Lucy. She had read Kinkakuji, and identified with the tragic monk who was told by a fortune-teller not to travel to the northwest because it would bring bad luck, so he did. I was not deterred from going northwesterly; if anything, the bad luck pulled me in that direction. Like the ugly, stammering Mizoguchi, I could not but think of myself as connected in some way to a place that was so prone to malevolence.

  Lily was waiting for me on the platform at Tokyo station. We were taking the shinkansen to Niigata and there we would board a ferry to the island. I had told Teiji of our plans but didn’t expect him to come. As far as I knew, Teiji had not been outside Tokyo since he’d arrived, aged fourteen, to meet Uncle Soutaro for the first time. Why would he want to? With his camera and his long, solitary nights on the streets, he had come to understand Tokyo as a limitless form, a voice that called him then ran away and hid. For Teiji, each street, or bridge, or river was another connection in the spiral he was bidden to follow, outward and outward without ever finding the end. Why would he want to disprove this truth so comically by getting on a train and traveling out to the city’s physical edge and beyond, seeing the clear line where Tokyo stops and the countryside begins? And of course, I thought he wouldn’t want to be with me. I was too strange.

  Some part of Lucy’s thesis was wrong, for two minutes after finding Lily and leading her to the correct part of the platform, I spotted Teiji. He had just come
through the ticket barrier and was waving at me. I jumped up in the air with joy. Lily squeezed my arm.

  When he reached me, I hugged him. Hugging Teiji was not like a normal embrace because he didn’t respond in the usual way. He didn’t hug back but neither did he stand coldly as if being embraced by an old aunt. It was something in between that I couldn’t fathom. I put my arms around him, squeezed only slightly—just enough to feel the unique fingerprint of his warmth and muscles—and pulled back so as not to risk making him uncomfortable.

  “I never thought you’d come,” I said.

  “I miss the sea.” He inhaled deeply as if he could already smell it. “I used to love the ocean but I never go there anymore. And I didn’t want you to go without me.”

  I smiled at that and I think his words repeated themselves all the way to Sado.

  The journey led us away from the industrial pulse of Japan and toward the green paddy fields and hills of the countryside. I forced Lily to study Japanese by pointing out features we passed and getting her to repeat the Japanese names. At first she didn’t want to.

  “It’s too hard. Look at me. I haven’t even got O-level French.”

  “Never mind, this is Japanese and you’re not taking your O-levels today. Look over there. See? That’s a mori.”

  “Where, what?”

  “Guess,” said Teiji. He was sitting on the other side of the aisle. He turned in his seat to join in the lesson, rested one foot over the other. His trousers were baggy, looked as though there were no legs inside them, just crumpled cotton.

  Lily blushed. She didn’t mind being bad at Japanese with me, but in front of a Japanese person she was acutely self-conscious. Lucy has this syndrome in reverse. I’ve never minded making mistakes when I’m speaking to a native Japanese speaker, but if a non-Japanese person is listening, I like to be word-perfect.

  “That—the mountain?” She pointed her finger feebly at one of the many high peaks that spread toward the sky-line.